Back in the summer of 2021, Google released a core web vitals update that makes page speeds an important ranking factor for all pages of your site. Ever since then, people have been more aware of how fast their website loads. The question we often get is how website speeds affect their ability to show up in search results.
Here is a look at what you need to know:
What Is A Good Page Load Speed?
It’s recommended that most sites load within 3 seconds of someone clicking on the link. You can check to see how your website is loading on both mobile and desktop here. Often times your desktop may be doing ok, but the mobile site isn’t. It’s important to look at both of those metrics and make the necessary changes to get them to load faster.
What Causes My Website To Load Slowly?
When you run your site through a page speed checker, it will give you recommendations on what needs to be done in order to speed up the site. Here are a few common reasons your site may be loading slowly:
- Pictures are too big – when you download a picture from an image source, make sure you change the pixels to 600-700. Most images download around the neighborhood of 5,000+. This causes a large drain on your site speeds.
- Sliders – if you have any type of slider on your site, whether it is a testimonial slider, image slider, etc., it will affect your site speed. Remove sliders for a better user experience.
- Hosting – the provider you host with can affect the speed of your site. You may need to upgrade the type of hosting you have or switch to another hosting company. We offer to hosting for our clients, and as part of that plan, we make sure the hosting provider is able to keep up with site speeds.
There are a few things one of our developers can do to speed up your website if it is failing on desktop or mobile.
How Does Poor Load Speeds Affect My SEO?
Ultimately, when your site loads slowly, Google will take that into account when deciding which position to show your site in search results. Their biggest goal is to provide a user with the best possible experience.
If Google crawls your site and loads slowly, it’s going to move on. This will affect your SEO because Google crawlers abandon the site before it has all of the information. This is why you may receive errors from your Google Search Console that says your text is too close together. Usually, this means your site didn’t load quickly enough for the crawlers to capture your website data.
If My Site Loads Slowly, Does That Mean It Won’t Rank?
It’s important to note that this is a single ranking factor…meaning just because your website loads lightning fast doesn’t mean you’ll suddenly show up at the top of search results. So, while it is important to have a site that loads quickly, it doesn’t mean your site has to be passing to show up in search results.
This being said, if your site is failing on desktop, mobile, or both, you should work on improving it. Making a few tweaks to get it to load faster will help search engine optimization on your site.
Contact Us For Site Speed Help
Is your site loading slowly? If so, reach out to us, and we’ll be happy to provide you with a quote to speed up the site. Fill out our contact form here, and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can.
