Improve Your Page Load Speeds

If you do One Thing this month to improve your website’s ability to produce leads, make it your website’s page loading speeds.

Why Page Load Speed is Important

Page load speed is necessary because a mobile experience is essential. Mobile is vital for almost every online marketing channel.

• SEO. Although Mobilegeddon was a bust, I think the relationship between mobile and SEO will become more important soon. Google is already seeing more visitors from mobile devices than desktops. Because mobile is important to Google, page load times will become a more important ranking factor. Some say they already are.
• PPC. A page’s load time can affect your Quality Score. With a better Quality Score, you can pay less for the same number of clicks. Improve your page load times and make your PPC campaign even more effective.
• Social Media. People are overlooking the relationship between social media and mobile. How do most people consume social media? On their mobile devices. Want better social engagement with your website? Improve your page load speeds.
• Email. In the same way, most people read their emails on mobile devices. If you want those email visitors to continue having strong conversion rates, ensure your website loads quickly.

How to Measure Page Load Speeds

It’s challenging to measure page load speeds consistently. Load time depends on many factors, including your device, your internet connection, and whether you’ve visited the website. What might seem like an acceptable page load time to you might frustrate your customers and cause you to lose sales or leads.

We need an objective measurement tool.

Google has a better Page Load Speed tool: https://pagespeed.web.dev/. It doesn’t measure your page over time, but on a 100-point scale. The closer you are to 100, the quicker your webpage loads.

How to Improve Your Page Load Speed

Enter your webpage using this tool and see some actions you should take to improve your page’s load times. Since this tool works on a page-by-page basis, enter a couple of essential landing pages, such as a particular service page or the contact-us page. Give these directions to your web developer and ask them for some help.

The problem with this tool is that it only analyzes a page at a time. This can make it difficult to diagnose a site-wide loading issue.

This is where Google Search Console becomes helpful. If you visit “Core Web Vitals” (in the left sidebar), you will find a graph listing the performance of pages on your site. If you have pages in red, they are held back in the SERPs because of poor performance. If you have green pages, Google will give them a slight boost in search results. Yellow pages can be improved to become green pages.

Use this report to focus on pages that need the most help.

Pro-tip: Focus on the performance of Mobile pages. Not only is Google’s algorithm mobile-first, meaning your mobile scores matter for a ranking boost, but if you can improve your mobile page performance, it often improves your desktop too. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to work the other way around.

Is this graph telling you “Not enough usage data…”? Then you should probably focus on something else. This is one of many ranking factors for a page, and probably not the most critical factor. If you’re not getting enough traffic to generate results in this report, do other things to get more traffic. Once you start seeing data here, put time into this improvement. In other words, if you don’t have enough traffic to see page speed data in this graph, improving your page speed will probably not improve your traffic.