Web Page Speed and SEO

What is the page speed?

Page speed is a measurement parameter of how fast the content on your page will load.

Page speed is often confused with "website speed," which is a page speed for a single page on the website. Page speed can be described in either "webpage load time" (the time it takes to fully display the content on your page), or "time to first byte" (how long it takes for the browser to receive the first information from the webserver).

You can evaluate your page speed with Google's PageSpeed Insights service. PageSpeed Insights Speed Score incorporates data from CrUX (Chrome User Experience Report) and reports on two important speed metrics:

• First Contentful Paint (FCP) and
• DOMContentLoaded (DCL).

SEO best practices

Google has announced that website speed (and, as a result, page speed) is one of the parameters used by its algorithm to rank web pages. And research has shown that Google might precisely measure time to the first byte as when it considers page speed. In addition to this, a slow page speed means that search engines can crawl fewer pages using their allocated crawl budget, which could negatively affect your indexation and SEO.

Web page speed is also important to user experience (UX). Pages with a longer load time tend to have higher bounce rates and lower average time on pages. Longer load times have also been shown to negatively affect conversions.

Here are some of the many ways to increase your page speed:

• Enable compression
• Minify CSS, JavaScript, and HTML
• Remove render-blocking JavaScript
• Reduce redirects
• Leverage browser caching
• Improve server response time
• Use a content distribution network
• Optimize images