Is your website’s page speed fast enough for Google?

Yes, page speed affects your business’s ability to find and keep clients. What are you doing about it?

What is page speed?

Also known as “page load time”, page speed describes how much time the browser takes to obtain the first byte from the web server. In other words, page speed is how quickly content appears on your website. 

Why is it important to Google?

Google calculates the time needed to load the first byte, and considers this in website rankings. That’s right, page speed affects your rankings too! Google has bots called “Google Spiders” that “crawl” through your webpage, index it, and rank it accordingly. Based on the “crawl budget” assigned, a Google Spider may not be able to check all of your website because of slow page speed. If it doesn’t check sufficient pages, your ranking could go down significantly.

It’s important for users too.

User experience is directly aligned with the page speed. Slowly loading pages make users spend less time on the website, and hence increase their “bounce rate” (how many people get bored and leave while your page loads). That’s how an increased load time can cause a significant drop in conversions.

How can you check page speed?

There are many tools available for analyzing page speed and figuring out what loopholes need to be fixed. One of these is Pingdom, a reliable speed test tool that helps you test the website speed.  You only need to type in the website URL to inspect the website uptime, interactions, and performance. 

If you discover your website is too slow for Google, we recommend coming up with a plan to deal with the issue as soon as possible. Sales hang in the balance!