Why Every Perth SEO Company Is Monitoring Page Speed And What You Can Do

There are plenty of nifty tricks and strategies that you can implement to boost your rankings, from long-tail keywords to meta-data, but page speed is one that even the best SEO company should be honing in on. For the user, page speed can make or break an experience. About 47% of people expect their page to be loaded in 2 seconds or less - and 40% of people will leave the page after more than 3 seconds. That sounds shocking - I mean, 3 seconds - but if you were on your lunch break and needed to find the best business to charter a fishing trip for the weekend, the odds are that you’d react the same way. This can be exacerbated by automatic videos or audio trying to load in the background, leaving the user staring at a blank screen and staccatoed notes of that rad song you thought would be great on the homepage. Page speed is one of the many signals Google will look for, but your SEO is more or less a reflection of the user experience. While page speed is a factor, try to consider how it may affect your conversions. Even a 100-millisecond increase in speed translated to a 1% increase in revenue for Amazon in 2006! Whether the page speed offers your visitor more confidence in your brand, or if you are cutting down the time to consider whether that collectors edition of comics is really worth their life savings, page speed can work some magic on your SEO and ROI. And it’s not just the desktop experience a Perth SEO company like Dilate needs to be thinking about - there are updates on the horizon such as AMP, or accelerated mobile pages, from Google. AMP is an open-source framework for you to create a mobile page without all the unnecessary bulk behind it that a normal website is carrying. If your website is a buffet, your AMP should be a selection of hors d'oeuvres with all of your delicious tidbits arranged neatly. While it’s not perfect in every sense - your Analytics will be less effective and your ad revenue will drop - if you’re looking for an quick and effective mobile user experience, AMP’s will deliver. New resources like this will be changing the expected load time of mobile device users as more and more pages are streamlined to fit this. Don't forget, forecasters estimate that 70% of our online time comes from our mobile devices, so if your website isn’t keeping up with the pace then you’ll see it falling behind.

What Can You Do?

If you don’t have an SEO company monitoring your page speed and making the correct adjustments, then you may want to implement some of the changes below. A great place to start is simply with Google Page Speed Tools, so you can see how your page is performing so far. Once you’ve assessed your page speed, experiment with these tips and see if you can cut any more seconds off the clock.

GZIP Compression:

Ask your web host if they use GZIP compression, where your file sizes are reduced (by up to 70%!), without compromising quality. It’s a fairly common practice, you may already be using it so double check.

Images:

In tools like Photoshop, locate the “Save for Web” option to reduce image size, with a quality slider so you can see the changes to quality for file size. An image quality slider lets you see the visual trade-offs between graphic file size and crispness. HTML can make it easy to create a smaller version of the image, but that doesn’t mean it’s technically ‘small’. It’s still taking up the same amount of room on the server, and the browser has to load the image before resizing. For more tips like these, why not speak with the pros? Dilate Digital offer a digital consulting service to businesses of all shapes and sizes. We can walk your through the strategies and stages that could boost your business, and show you how to do it yourself - leaving you in charge of your own online marketing with professional guidance. Sound’s good, right?