Page speed is defined as the time taken by the server to display all the content present on a specific page. Site speed is similar to page speed but differs in certain ways. Site speed is referred to as the average speed of several pages on a website. It was stated by Google in 2010 that site speed can adversely affect the ranking of your website. While it takes almost 7 seconds for the normal e-commerce websites to load, 3 seconds is considered as the ideal loading time.
Hence, it is evident that site speed can influence SEO as it employs a crucial impact on the user experience of the audience. Your target will not be satisfied with your page if it takes too much time to load which might urge them to close the window instead of waiting for it to load.
Let us view all are the factors that lower the site speed:
- Website theme: Certain themes might be heavily designed which could negatively affect the speed of your site. It is an acknowledged fact that ‘the more designed your site is, the more time it would take to load the page’. Hence sticking to a less complex idea would be an advantage for your site.
- Images that are too large: Images with comparatively larger sizes intend to take more time to load, and hence delay the site’s speed. The use of PNG images would be more preferable if the image does not require high quality.
- Too many ads together: if a large number of ads pop up simultaneously on your website, it has a natural tendency to slow down the speed of the site.
Tools to speed up the website are given as follows:
- Minimize HTTP requests: AN HTTP request is attached to each of the elements like scripts, images, style sheets, etc. Reducing the number of requests therefore will ultimately lead to an increase in site speed.
- Loading of CSS and JavaScript files asynchronously: Scripts such as JavaScript and CSS can be loaded in two different ways, ie synchronously and asynchronously. Loading the files in an asynchronous way can help you enhance your site speed as it moves from top to bottom while the browser loads a certain page.
- Minimizing the first-byte time: Time to first byte, also known as TTFB is the appropriate amount of time a browser has to wait it gets the first byte of data from the server. It would be perfect to have your TTFB under 200ms. Issues that concern the network, web server configuration, traffic, etc are attributed as the main reason for having sloe TTFB.
- Choose your web hosting in accordance with the need: The choosing of the cheapest possible hosting option is favored by most of the upcoming site owners. This action cannot be encouraged as it has many flaws. Cheapest hosting such as shared hosting will be enough for low-traffic sites. But when it comes to high-traffic sights, shared hosting becomes a burden as it tends to slow down the site speed.
- Google Page-Speed Insights: It is the best tool for the detection speed of sites. It offers a very detailed and informative description of how fast your site can load on mobiles and desktops. In addition, the test also provides you with advantageous suggestions to improve the load time, decrease file size, etc.
A rich snippet contains an additional piece of information that the search engine is able to identify on the page. It helps to understand the value of the specific page. A rich snippet always contains more information than the normal snippet that’s why we call it a rich snippet.
Table snippets are very popular because it can pull the specific information the user is looking for, and recreate its own table in a user understandable format.
