- Obtaining good page speed scores is vital to improving your SEO performance and overall quality of the user experience of your website.
- Slow web pages reduce conversion rates and page views, whilst increasing bounce rates.
- Google will move to ranking all page speed scores to “Mobile-First” by the end of March 2021 (Originally September 2020).
- Marketers and website owners should adopt a mobile-first mind-set.
- Having an excellent server setup will not guarantee good page speed scores.
The speed of pages on your website is an important factor affecting how your pages rank in Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs), a vital source of organic traffic. All things being equal, a site that loads quicker will outrank a competing site.
Simultaneously, page speed has a direct impact on developing and managing a positive user experience on your website for mobile and desktop users, and it can be directly correlated to their behavior i.e. engagement, bounce rates, repeat visits, cart abandonment, conversion rates, etc.
“The rise of customer expectations and increasing use of smartphones are amplifying the need for mobile speed. The competitive gap will widen between brands who provide great mobile experience and those who don’t.”
Deloitte/Google, 2019
With the mass adoption of smartphones, their varying connection speeds and screen sizes make optimization extremely important, check your analytics to quantify how many visitors are on mobile devices, it will probably be the majority and in my personal experience with many client sites, I am consistently seeing media sites with an ~80% bias towards mobile, and corporate or ecommerce sites with a bias of >60%. (This however can vary by ages range of the user and country.)
Therefore it is extremely important that brands/companies/marketers start to adopt the “mobile-first” mind-set introducing the right processes and allocating resources to constantly monitor and optimize their site speed.
In a recent study entitled “Milliseconds Make Millions”, by Google/Deloitte in November 2019, they found a direct correlation between page speed and revenue. The study highlighted the fact that improving your load time by 0.1s can boost conversion rates by 8%.
In the same study, retail consumers spent almost 10% more, while lead generation and luxury consumers engaged more, with page views increasing by 7% and 8% respectively.
Further studies also suggest that users are not willing to accept a slow loading site, with 70% of consumers admitting that page speed impacts their willingness to buy from an online retailer(1) and in the US, latency is the number one reason why consumers decide to abandon mobile sites(2), with 10% blaming slow downloads as a reason for not purchasing(3).
So as we have seen, there is a very strong case that you need to be focusing on optimizing your site pages for speed (benefiting site owners and site users) and prioritizing the mobile version of your site, read on to learn how page speed is measured generally, specifically by Google, how it impacts SEO, how to quantify the quality of your current user experience, and the free tools you can use to audit your own web presence to determine if you need to take action or not.
What is page speed?
When we talk about page speed, we are referring to how long it takes for an individual website page to load (your homepage, a section page, a product page, a post/article etc.), and it is important not to conflate “page speed” with “site speed”, which is the average speed of a sample of pages from an individual website.
The speed of a page can be measured in various ways, the most commonly used metrics include:
- Time To First Bite (TTFB)
The time that your website takes to start the loading process - Time To Interactive (TTI)
How long it takes a page to become fully interactive. - Fully Loaded (FL)
The time it takes for your website to fully load. - First Meaningful Paint (FMP)
How fast your page loads meaningful content.
How does page speed affect your SEO?
Google has employed page speed as one of its ranking factors since 2010, and starting on July 1, 2019, mobile-first indexing was enabled by default for all new websites (new to the web or previously unknown to Google Search).
In March 2020, Google announced that it will be moving to Mobile-First Indexing for all websites as of September 2020. (Updated: Google recently put back the deadline to the end of March 2021 learn more >) This means that Google will prioritize the mobile version of your website when determining mobile compatibility and the perceived quality of the user experience.
If your website isn’t already optimized for mobile, or optimized badly (as in most cases I encounter with client sites), your discoverability and performance on SERPs is going to be adversely affected and as a consequence, your organic traffic from search is going to suffer.
How does Google measure your page speed?
So we’ve looked at the general metrics used to measure page speed and later on we will review a number of web based applications you can employ to audit your pages, Google goes deep in the way they evaluate and calculate a score for your pages to inform its algorithms, and as mentioned above, prioritizing the mobile version as a source of data.
You can review how your score for the mobile and desktop versions of your website pages by entering the individual URLs of your pages into the Google Page Speed Insights tool, one at a time.
TIP:
Run the test twice for each page to mitigate fluctuations in the performance of infrastructure (CDN’s, server response times, location etc.).
In the results you will notice it is employing 6 metrics when looking at page speed performance:
- First Contentful Paint (FCP)
The time from when the page starts loading to when any part of the page’s content is rendered on the screen (text, images (including background images), <svg> elements, etc. - Speed Index
How quickly content is visually displayed during page load. - Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
The render time of the largest content element visible within the viewport (the visible area of a webpage, on your screen, which changes between mobile and desktop views). - Time To Interactive (TTI)
How long it takes a page to become fully interactive. - Total Blocking Time
The total amount of time between FCP and TTI where the main thread was blocked for long enough to prevent input responsiveness. - Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)
A layout shift occurs any time a visible element changes its position from one frame to the next.
Your score is presented as a percentage of compliance with Google’s guidelines for each metric, it highlights problems causing negative scores and presents opportunities for you to pursue to improve your score.
The percentage score will be graded within three broad categories of action using a traffic light system: Good (Green), Needs Improvement (Amber), and Poor (Red).
Now it is important to note, that the metrics LCP & CLS (denoted by a blue tag icon) are included in the page speed test, and they focus on the overall user experience, so let’s take a quick look at how Google is quantifying user experience…
Using Google’s Web.Dev to improve your user experience
As part of the page speed analysis, Google includes metrics from its Web Vitals initiative part of the broader Web.Dev initiative to improve user experience around the web, the vitals metrics are defined signals Google employs to determine if your website has a “healthy” user experience, and as we saw earlier, speed and user experience are directly correlated to user behavior.
You can use these metrics to help you quantify the experience of your site and identify opportunities to improve it. You should aim to achieve results at least in the top 75th percentile however we would always aim for >90th percentile:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
The render time of the largest content element visible within the viewport (the visible area of a webpage, on your screen, which changes between mobile and desktop views). - First Input Delay (FID)
The time from when a user first interacts with a page (e.g. when they click a link or tap on a button) to the time when the browser is actually able to respond to that interaction. - Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)
A layout shift occurs any time a visible element changes its position from one frame to the next.
TIP:
When you are developing a new website use the four Web.Dev standards to set a strong level of quality control for your new build:
1) Performance
2) Accessibility
3) Best Practices
4) SEO
Great tools to review your page speed
So what tools are available to you to determine the overall health of your web pages? Here we will take a look at the popular tools you can use to drive improvements in your page speed scores or utilize them during a new website development project.
It is important to note, that when you are developing a new website, you should from the start, integrate page speed as a key requirement into the development and validation processes, it is so much easier than having to retrofit solutions to an existing web presence to achieve top scores.
Even if you are not a technical expert, you can use these tools to guide your technical team, and utilize them for signing off a completed project and making the final payment.
They are also extremely valuable in benchmarking yourself against best practice examples from other sectors and more importantly, your direct competitors with the view to gaining a short-term competitive advantage.
- Google Page Speed Insights (Free)
Check your PageSpeed score as defined by Google, essential if you are optimizing for Google!
Test Your PageSpeed > - Web.Dev / Lighthouse by Google (Free)
A Google initiative designed to help improve the user experience of websites around the world. The audit focuses on four key categories affecting user experience i.e. Performance (AKA PageSpeed), Accessibility, Best Practices, and SEO.
A very important tool, I especially like the “View Report” feature that provides in-depth guidance on what you can do to improve within each category.
Audit Your Pages > - GTMetrix.com (Free)
Combines PageSpeed and YSlow auditing tools, that present a lot of information about the specifics of where your pages/websites are failing.
Amongst other useful data sets, you can view your fully loaded times, page size, and the request-by-request visualization of the page load via the waterfall chart, extremely useful when analyzing specifically why your page is loading slowly.
Test Your PageSpeed > - WebPageTest.org (Free)
Speed test from multiple locations around the globe using real browsers (IE and Chrome) and at real consumer connection speeds. Provides many functionalities that your developers should be using when building a site in the first place.
Review Page Performance > - ByteCheck.com (Free)
Very simple app that measures your Time To First Byte, a useful indicator for the responsiveness of your webserver and network resources involved in serving your site.
Review Your Server Response Times > - Pingdom.com (Paid Subscription)
Measure your load time from multiple locations, website availability, and review waterfall charts amongst many other functionalities.
Measure Your Page Load Time >
Once you understand your state of health, and specifically what is causing low scores, you can proceed to implementing activities designed to improve performance and get those google page speed scores green!
Coming Soon: “Best practices for improving your Google page speed score”
Conclusion
Page speed is extremely important for onsite SEO, but more importantly, for delivering a positive user experience to your users, one that increases conversions or content consumption, and decreases bounce rates.
Page speed should be at the foundation of your new web development projects and you should remember that the speed of a page is not just determined by how good your servers are.
Use the open source tools to improve your site, and drive change through clear guidance of your technical partners.
References:
- Optimize Your Mobile Checkout To Capture More Mobile Web Sales. May 9, 2017 | Forrester]
- https://unbounce.com/page-speed-report/
- Must-Have eCommerce Features Road Map: The Retail eCommerce Playbook April 18, 2019| Forrester
By the way…
If you run disruptable.net through these tools, you will see we have very good scores, some perfect, some not so perfect, it wasn’t easy for us as we opted for a wordpress.com shared hosting solution (not to be confused with wordpress.org self-hosted sites), which includes some pretty bloated plugins at its core (JetPack) and limits what tools and techniques you can employ to improve page speed, many “experts” say it is not possible to get good scores with wordpress.com sites and certain other frameworks, however it is clear that the service can be optimized and provide a valuable platform for businesses versus the more complicated self-hosted solutions.
If you are trying to improve your google PageSpeed or Web.Dev scores, get in touch with us to see if we can help you, we work with all frameworks and can provide guidance or, implement optimizations.
2 thoughts on “The importance of page speed for SEO and the user experience”