Identifying and Hitting an Acceptable Site Speed

From SEO-friendly content to a mobile-friendly site, you ticked every box before your website launch. But is that all?

What if your site’s testing your visitors’ patience level?

Google hates slow loading websites and won’t consider putting them on the SERPs (search engine results page) until you obtain the right speed.

So, to hit the right speed, you must first identify the current site speed.

How can you find the right site speed?

Finding the right speed is easier than ever with tools like:

1. https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
2. https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/feature/testmysite/

By entering your site URL, you’ll see similar-looking screens:

OR

As you can see, the above screenshots show the current site speed & score along with the recommended rate & score. Additionally, it suggests doing the needful to achieve the ideal speed, which brings us to.

How to obtain the ideal speed?

Upon examining the results, you’ll be advised to take steps like:

1. Minify CSS, JS, and HTML
   Optimising your code by removing spaces, commas, newlines, etc. can dramatically increase your page speed.

2. Reduce redirects
   More redirects mean more time for the HTTP request. So, trim down the redundant redirects to improve page speed.

3. Optimise images
   The images should be in PNG or WebP format; images compressed for the web helps a lot.

What is the ideal site speed?

There’s not a specific number to give away, but as per Google, the bounce rate increases to 32% as load time increases to 3 seconds. So, a site load time under 3 seconds is advised.

Conclusion

At last, continuous optimization of the site’s resources is the key to hitting the right speed.