Page Speed & SEO: What You Need To Know

Did you know that page speed is a direct Google ranking factor and likely a ranking factor for other search engines as well?

Your site’s performance plays a significant role in your search engine rankings, making it vital for search engine optimization (SEO).

In this post, we cover exactly how page speed relates to SEO as well as how to improve it.

What is page speed?

Page speed is a metric that calculates how fast your website loads from a user’s perspective. It’s also known as “page load time” or “page load speed.”

It’s an important metric to track as it gives you an idea of how well your site performs. Before users read your content or see the design of your website, they need to load it.

They’re not going to stick around if your website takes too long to load. This means fewer conversions and sales.

It also means lower search rankings since Google prefers to rank websites that perform well.

How does site speed affect SEO?

Page speed is important for two reasons: users and Google.

Users expect all websites to fully load the second they land on them, and Google still uses website speed as a direct ranking factor.

Ranking factors are metrics Google measures to determine where to rank websites for specific keywords on search engine results pages (SERPs). It’s not the most important ranking factor given that a lot of authoritative websites get away with having slow loading speeds, but it is pretty high up there.

Here are a few statistics that prove how site speed affects SEO:

  • The top 20 websites in the United States have an average page speed of 1.08 seconds (s). (Blogging Wizard)
  • The top 10 ecommerce websites in the United States have an average page speed of 1.96s. (Blogging Wizard)
  • A site whose loading speed is three seconds has a bounce rate that’s 32% more likely to increase than a site whose loading speed is only one second. (Think with Google)
  • The average page loading speed of websites who make the first SERP on Google is 1.65s. (Backlinko1)
  • Page speed is a top 20 Google ranking factor out of 200 total ranking factors. The source also cites website speed as an important component of technical SEO, which they name as a top 8 ranking factor. (Backlinko2)

Note: Google seems to be less likely to rank slow websites but it’s unlikely you’ll see much (if any) ranking improvements from making small improvements to a website that’s already fast. Still, it will be beneficial to your users regardless. Faster is better when it comes to website performance.

How to check your website speed

Use these tools to monitor your website’s performance:

Each tool more or less works in the same way. You start by putting in an individual page URL into the tool’s URL textbox.

Run separate tests to test how fast the following pages load:

  • Homepage
  • Individual blog post
  • Individual product page

You can also test your most popular pages as well as specific pages you want to optimize for SEO.

google pagespeed insights url

PageSpeed Insights is the easiest tool to use. All you need to do is insert your URL into the textbox, and click Analyze.

The tool will split your results into two categories: one that analyzes how your site performs on mobile devices and one for desktop. This tool’s analyses for mobile is almost always lower than its analyses for desktop, so don’t obsess over getting both to 100.

Mobile searches are much more popular than desktop searches, though, so don’t ignore it entirely. Just focus on getting the top four metrics in the green category, or scores that range from 90 to 100.

google pagespeed insights results

Underneath these scores are five individual metrics, some of which are known as Core Web Vitals. These are metrics Google created to represent how specific aspects of a website performs.

They all fall under the umbrella of “page speed:”

  • First Contentful Paint (FCP) – The time between when a user first lands on a page to when any of the page’s content renders.
  • Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) – How quickly the main content of a web page loads.
  • Total Blocking Time (TBT) – Total amount of time after FCP when the main thread was blocked long enough to prevent user input.
  • Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) – The shifting of elements while the page is being downloaded and rendered.
  • Speed Index – Measures how quickly the page’s content gets displayed visually during the loading process.

Uptrends and WebPageTest allow you to get pretty technical with your speed tests.

They both allow you to choose a specific location to test from along with specific devices, network types and browsers.

uptrends testing parameters

Your website will load differently based on the user’s device and network speed, so it’s a good idea to test your website with different parameters to ensure it loads quickly for all users.

If you’re not sure, check your site’s analytics. It’ll let you know where in the world most of your visits are located, which browsers they use and which operating systems they use.

Along with page speed, these tools also provide a couple of additional metrics:

  • Time to Interactive (TTI) – The amount of time it takes before the page is loaded enough for the user to interact with it.
  • Time to First Byte (TTFB) – The time between when a request* is first made to when the first byte of the request begins to arrive.

*A request is what happens between a user’s browser and your website when a user first visits your website. Generally, the more requests your website produces, the longer it’ll take to load.

What affects website speed?

Several aspects of your website affects how fast it’s able to load:

  • Hosting infrastructure
  • Server location relative to your user’s location
  • Images
  • Web design, especially your content management system (CMS), theme/template and the presence of animations
  • The size of your web pages
  • The number of requests your website produces

We’ll talk about how to optimize these in a bit.

What is a good website speed for SEO?

According to a study conducted by ToolTester, the average page loading time of the top 100 websites is 2.5s on desktop and 8.6s on mobile.

This means if your page load time is at or below this average, you can make a pretty fair bet that your site is well optimized based on industry standards.

10 website speed SEO tips

1. Upgrade your hosting infrastructure

All sites are hosted on a server. Different hosting infrastructures exist, and the one you use has a definitive impact on your site’s ability to load quickly and perform well.

For example, if you’re using a cheap shared hosting plan, you can experience a significant increase in performance by upgrading to virtual private hosting (VPS) or cloud hosting.

This is because shared hosting, although affordable, uses a server infrastructure that’s designed to host multiple websites on a single server, meaning all websites “share” the same hosting infrastructure.

Unfortunately, all websites on a shared hosting server share that server’s resources. So, if other websites on your shared server need more resources, they take resources away from your site, which can impact performance.

This is why VPS and cloud hosting are most recommended, even for smaller sites.

They both give you private access to your server’s resources. Cloud hosting even has the ability to scale, which means it’s able to access more resources if your site gets hit with a sudden surge in traffic.

There’s also a type of hosting called dedicated hosting, which gives you access to your very own dedicated server. However, as this type of hosting is quite expensive, it’s only recommended for enterprise sites that receive millions and millions of visits a month.

Still, I’d go as far as to say that cloud hosting is the most convenient because you can usually scale resources as you need them.

2. Use a content delivery network

A content delivery network, or CDN, is a system you can add to your hosting infrastructure to significantly improve its performance and improve server response time.

A CDN is a collection of servers that’s interconnected on the same global network. Each server on the network hosts a copy of your website’s content, which allows your content to be served by individual servers within the network rather than your origin server, which is the server your website is installed on.

When all traffic gets directed to your origin server, it consumes a lot of bandwidth and causes significant strain on the server.

Upgrading your hosting infrastructure and the amount of resources you have access to increases performance, but distributing that traffic to a CDN with servers located around the world is another fantastic way to improve performance.

cloudflare network

Your host may already have a CDN enabled for your site, or it may be easy for you to enable a CDN from your hosting panel.

If not, check out NitroPack.

NitroPack is a website optimization plugin for WordPress that has a CDN powered by Cloudflare, one of the web’s leading CDN providers.

3. Activate browser caching

Page caching is a web optimization technique that stores copies of your site’s content files in your user’s browser, which allows that content to load instantaneously the next time your user visits.

There’s also a complex form of caching called prefetching that allows the user’s browser to anticipate a visit to a particular website and grab a copy of that website before the user even visits it.

This allows the website’s content to load instantaneously, even if they’ve never visited your website before.

We mostly recommend NitroPack and WP Rocket if you want to enable caching on your website.

Along with regular page caching and prefetching, it offers automatic cache warmup, device and cookie-aware caching, and browser and session-aware caching.

WP Rocket is another great optimization tool for WordPress that also offers caching.

For other options, check out Ecommerce Bonsai’s post on speed optimization plugins for WordPress.

4. Optimize images

Text on a web page often loads the quickest, but images can take significantly longer to load, even when they’re toward the bottom of the page.

Fortunately, there’s a lot you can do to optimize images on a website.

First, know which image format to use.

If your image is a screenshot or has overlays, such as text and graphics, use PNG.

If you’re shooting images yourself with your own camera, use JPEG.

Next, reduce the image’s resolution. The exact size it should be depends on your website. Fortunately, many CMSs, such as WordPress, are able to resize images for you.

However, if your raw image files are quite large, you should reduce their resolution before you upload them to your server. Just make sure you do so with an image editing software to ensure you don’t lose image quality.

You should also compress your images. You can do this with photo editing software, a third-party tool like TinyPNG or as you upload them.

tinypng image compression

For example, NitroPack and WP Rocket have image optimization features, including the ability to compress all images on your website.

Finally, implement lazy loading for your images.

Lazy loading is a web optimization technique that prevents an image from loading until the user scrolls to where it’s located on a web page. This means the user doesn’t need to wait for your entire page to load in order to view your website.

WordPress implements lazy loading automatically, but you can also use plugins like NitroPack and WP Rocket.

5. Optimize files

Websites are built with code, but that code is stored in hundreds, sometimes even thousands of files, many of which are quite large.

The larger your page size is, the longer it’ll take to load.

You can reduce page size and improve page speed by optimizing your files, especially your HTML, CSS and JavaScript files.

This means minifying and compressing each one of these file types.

This is a pretty complex technique for the average webmaster to implement, so you’re better off using an optimization plugin.

Both NitroPack and WP Rocket offer file optimization, including GZIP compression as well as the ability to load JS deferred or asynchronous.

6. Reduce HTTP requests

When a user needs to load a file on your website, their browser sends an HTTP request to your website.

The more requests your website requires, the longer it’ll take to load. This is why reducing the number of requests your website produces can do a lot to improve its performance.

The speed optimization tips we already recommended can do a lot to reduce requests, especially the file minification and compression features offered by NitroPack and WP Rocket.

You can also add a plugin like Perfmatters to the mix to disable scripts you don’t need on your website, which can significantly reduce the number of requests your website produces.

With Perfmatters, you can disable the following scripts, plus more:

  • Emojis
  • Comments
  • Comment URLs
  • Embeds
  • RSS feeds
  • RSS feed links
  • Self pingbacks
  • REST API for specific user types
  • Google Maps
  • Global styles
  • WooCommerce scripts and styles
  • WooCommerce widgets

You can also limit the number of post revisions your database stores as well as how often your site autosaves while editing.

You can also remove apps you don’t need from your website. If there are any apps you installed or connected to your website that are not important for user experience, sales or customer service, you may not need them.

7. Remove or optimize specific elements

Here are elements you may have on your website:

  • Popups
  • Background videos
  • Videos
  • Sliders
  • Animations
  • Advertisements

Removing these will significantly improve your website’s performance, especially its loading speed, but you can also optimize them instead if you don’t want to part ways with them.

For example, the only popups you really need to worry about are the ones that trigger as soon as your visitor lands on your website.

It’s okay if you need to load your cookie popup right away for legal purposes, but if your website also loads popups for discounts and your email list, you’re asking your visitor’s browser to load quite a bit before they even get to your content.

Delay these popups instead by triggering them with specific actions, such as exit intent, scroll percentage or idle time.

Background videos should almost never be used, but you can optimize other videos by using embeds from YouTube, Vimeo, Wistia or social media as well as by disabling autoplay.

Sliders and animations should be reduced to only one per page or even none if you can bring conversions without them.

Advertisements cause a significant decrease in performance, so it’s best to reduce your use of them as best as you can. Consider removing them entirely if they’re not a significant revenue stream for your business.

8. Use pagination and load more buttons

Some websites give users more options by loading additional content automatically.

For example, you may notice how some websites never seem to have a footer no matter how much you scroll down. They simply load more and more articles as you scroll.

It’s a technique intended to keep visitors on a web page for as long as possible, but it can cause a decrease in performance.

For archive pages and shop pages that display a lot of articles and products, use pagination or a load more button instead.

Pagination breaks the results down into multiple pages, which requires the user to click over to the next page in order to view more articles/products.

A load more button hides the additional articles/products until your visitor clicks “Load More.”

9. Switch to a lighter theme or template

Unfortunately, some themes and templates, especially third-party themes and templates for content management systems, are quite heavy. They have a lot of code and are poorly optimized. Some even grow in size as time goes on.

WordPress page builders like Elementor and Divi are notorious for causing slow page speed, but any theme is capable of being poorly optimized.

You’ll know it’s time to switch if you’ve implemented every tip on this list, and I mean truly implemented every tip (you’ve upgraded your hosting, optimized every image on your website, implemented caching and file compression, etc.) and still cannot seem to improve performance.

Changing the design of your website isn’t easy nor is deciding which new theme or template to choose.

So, only use this tip if you truly cannot seem to improve your website’s performance and do not have the resources to hire a developer to create a custom design for your site or optimize your current theme.

For WordPress, Kadence, GeneratePress and Bricks are known for their ease of use and optimized performance.

10. Reduce redirects

Redirects do have a negative impact on website speed.

Some redirects are necessary. For example, if you’ve moved your site from HTTP to HTTPS after implementing an SSL certificate, you’ll need to keep those redirects intact to ensure your visitors only load the encrypted versions of your web pages.

If you’ve changed a URL for a particular page, you’ll also need to keep that redirect intact in order to prevent a 404 error.

When you link to a page, avoid linking to one that has a redirect. Change the link so that it points to the page the original link redirects to instead.

You should also monitor your links with Google Search Console to correct 404 errors and check for redirects. Change or remove any that aren’t necessary.

For example, if you created a new page for an old article but that old article has no traffic or backlinks, you can safely remove it from your website instead of creating a redirect for it.

Final thoughts

The time your website takes to load matters. 

It matters to Google and it matters to users. But where Google is concerned, there is a bit of nuance.

While it is a direct ranking factor, it is more of a negative factor. For example, if your website is crazy slow, chances are that Google will be less likely to rank your website.

But if your website already loads fast, and you manage to speed it up by 50ms or so, you won’t see any benefit.

That said, faster is always better where users are concerned.