Many business owners won’t realize it early that website loading speed also affects the SEO. Some years back, Google had announced that it will also consider how fast pages load on different devices to rank the websites. This also means that along with working on various SEO techniques, you need to ensure that your site loads swiftly and serves your customers.
Website being slow affects SEO badly because it is affecting the user experience. Internet users most of the time are desperate to get information and expect pages to load faster especially the people who use mobile devices. After all, people with their hand on Smartphones would expect everything to be smart and quick. So you need to optimize your website to load faster and this will put you one step ahead to be on top of the search engine rankings.
A good rule thumb is to monitor your site regularly and check if it is taking less than 5 seconds to load. If your site can load in less than 1 sec then it is more than 95% efficient or above average. To improve the speed of your website you can follow a number of ways. First step involves reducing the number of HTTP requests. This improves your site’s speed almost immediately and you will notice it by searching without cache memory in the browser. When search engine crawlers visit the site, it will be easy for them to rank the pages. By reducing the HTTP requests, each page loads with less number of items. For instance, if a site has thirty images and descriptions it can take a long time to load fully. This can frustrate visitors and search engines.
Next take advantage of the CSS sprites while adding images to the website. This can combine multiple images into a single image. If there are multiple background images, then loading them individually can reduce the site’s speed. Using a single image will be easier to load and visitors will have good user experience.
Another great way to increase the speed of your website is to use the serve cache. In this case, server keeps a copy of the page in its cache and when the same page is requested again it is presented in less time. This considerably increases the website speed.
Indexing is a technique used to track the data stored in the database. It is same as the book index using which we navigate to specific pages to get information. With an index in the website, users have a good user experience and search engines find it easily to rank the website. It makes content in the website easier to find and eliminates delays of manually searching for information. Too many tracking codes in the website can slow it down. Remove the number of tracking codes to ensure success.
For more knowledge about increasing the speed of your website, you need to take help from a web designer or SEO expert to improve the user experience and ranking of the site. With all this mind you can enjoy success in your online business.