Why Page Speed Matters for SEO – Here’s Why #193

Can the speed at which your pages load really make a difference for your site?
In this episode of our popular Here’s Why digital marketing video series, our page speed expert John Dietrich makes the case for why you should try to improve page speed, and offers some tips on how to do it.

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Resources

• Page Speed Guide
• John Dietrich on Twitter
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Transcript

Eric: We’re very excited to have a special guest with us for this episode of Here’s Why. Let me introduce you all to John Dietrich, one of our expert marketing consultants who works directly with some of our clients to give them the SEO results they seek. Welcome, John.
John: Thanks Eric, I’m delighted to be here.
Eric: We asked you to join us today because he wrote an excellent guide for page speed on the Perficient Digital blog. We’ll tell our viewers how to get it at the end of this video. But first, this is a Here’s Why video. So, since that’s the case, tell us why we should pay attention to how fast page speed is on a site.
John: I’d be happy to.
First of all, it has a direct effect on user experience, especially on mobile, and that can directly affect your bottom line. Numerous studies have shown that even very small changes in page load speed can significantly impact conversations on mobile. As you can see in this table for enterprise-level commerce sites, it can mean a difference of millions or even billions of dollars.

Eric: Wow.
John: Google has also said having a slow page load speed could affect a page’s ranking in search. So, there are ample reasons to do what you can speed up your site.
Eric: Great. How can site owners know how their pages are performing?
John: That’s a really good question. Google provides two different tools for that, and there’s a link to them in the guide that we’ve written.
[Tweet “Learn about the tools Google provides to check your site’s page load speed…and why you should!”]
One of those tools provides a competitive analysis showing how you stack up against other sites. For example, here is how the top five online retailers compare with each other.

Another tool estimates how much revenue you could lose each second of decrease in your page load speed. So, using that calculator, we see that eBay could increase revenue by nearly $20 million with just a two-tenths of a second increase in their page load speed.

Eric: Wow, that’s cool. But you’ll find links to even more tools that can help you see what to do to improve your page speed in John’s guide. He also provides some instructions on how to use some of those tools.
For now, John, give our viewers some quick tips on best practices for improving the load time of their pages.
John: Sure, Eric.
I would start with the following:

1. Optimize your images, CSS and JavaScript
2. Leveraging browser caching and use server compression; various tools are available for all of these steps.
3. Reduce your server response time
4. Prioritize your visible content with lazy load
5. Consider using a content delivery network

Eric: Cool. Not sure what some of those are or how to do them? No worries. John gives you what you need to get started in his guide.

Don’t miss a single episode of Here’s Why. Click the subscribe button below to be notified via email each time a new video is published.

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See all of our Here’s Why Videos | Subscribe to our YouTube Channel