Page Speed

Google PageSpeed Insights

Google has delivered a wealth of tools to help web designers and business owners alike optimize their online experience. Nobody likes a slow-loading web page. In fact, most people would rather go back to their search and pick a different website rather than wait more than a few seconds for the page to load. Now, that’s not a lot of time, and if your website is slow you could be losing more customers than you realize. Today we’re going to take a look at Google Page Speed and how it impacts not only search engine optimization, but also your customer experience (and therefore your conversion rate).

Page Speed is a Ranking Factor

That’s right. Google has decided that the speed with which your page loads is actually a factor in where it ranks on the search engine. Then, the developers at Google created a tool that allows you to test the speed of your own website against a number of factors to determine whether or not it qualifies as a fast-loading website. It’s easy enough to use, and you can test your own website right now by clicking here and following the instructions on their page. Go ahead, try it now.

Google PageSpeed Insights measures your website’s performance for both desktop and mobile devices, and then assigns you a score ranging from 0-100 points. Just like school, a higher score is better, and a score of 85 and above means that your page is doing well. Page Speed doesn’t simply rank your website, though, it also offers suggestions and prioritizes the importance of certain factors. Anything with a red exclamation point is something you’ll want to pay attention to. According to Google, “fixing this would have a measurable impact on page performance”. It follows that yellow exclamation points indicate issues that you should consider fixing, and green check marks are areas where no significant issues were found.

Connection Speed

You may be wondering how they can tell the difference between a slow internet connection and a slowly-loading page. Well, since internet connection speeds can vary widely, PageSpeed Insights only looks at aspects of your page performance that are considered to be independent of the network. These aspects include the HTML structure of the page, server configuration, and the use of external resources like images, JavaScript, and CSS. While implementing as many suggestions as you can to improve page performance is recommended, bear in mind that the relative performance of any page is directly dependant on a user’s network connection speed.

Mobile Optimization

As we have mentioned previously, having a mobile-friendly website is a must these days. Whether or not your website is mobile responsive has a direct impact on its ranking in a search. In fact, Google has stated that websites that aren’t mobile optimized will suffer a “significant penalty”. Even if you have a good desktop site, if your mobile site isn’t responsive, then you’re going to take a huge hit. The important thing to know is that this will impact no less than 30% of your search traffic, maybe more. How can you find out what your site looks like on a mobile device? Simple. Google has created a testing tool. All you have to do is visit this website to find out what your website looks like to mobile device users, and most importantly, what Google thinks of your website. If the results aren’t pretty, then it’s time to go to work! Of course, the professional team at 33 Mile Radius can help you optimize your website, both in speed and mobile responsiveness—all you have to do is ask. Feel free to fill out our free website analysis form, and we’ll do a free website analysis and have a phone call with you to see if there’s anything we can do to educate or help you.

Transcription:

Today we’re going to talk about Google page speed and how it impacts not only search engine optimization, but also impacts your customer experience, and therefore your conversion rate. Think about it. Do you like really slow loading web pages or do you like fast loading web pages? To test it Google actually built a tool. Google came out months ago that said, “Hey page speed is definitely a ranking factor.” They want their customers to be happy. If you Google the word Google page speed test you can then click on that link and you’ll see here again that this is a tool built by Google, developers.google.com. This allows computer geeks like me to analyze your website, but you can do it yourself as well.
We’re going to do a quick test. This is kind of neat in the sense that it’ll do a couple of things. It’ll tell us what the score is. Imagine we’re back in high school or college or whatnot, “Hey, I got a 56 out of 100 on a test.” That’s failing. That’s really not a good thing, bad customer experience. Means that they’re probably going to hit the back button, go find somebody else. It does show you some technical reasons on why it occurred and how we can fix it and whatnot. This is for mobile. Then, if you view your desktop score. This one, you got 70 out of 100, which is like a D. This one failed, this one’s kind of like a D. Typically we want to get these anywhere from 85 to 95. I like 90 to 95. Again, do you like slow loading websites? No. Do your customers? No. Does Google? No.
What happens is, Google’s looking at your site and they have over 200 factors that they consider when ranking your website. They go, “Okay, this website on mobile looks to load extremely slow.” If you look over here on the right hand side of this image you can also see that it actually isn’t even mobile friendly. The font is tiny. It’s just not a mobile-friendly website. Because it’s not mobile friendly, that’s another topic that we’ll get into is why you should have a responsive website and why it needs to be mobile friendly. Actually, April 21st of 2015 Google’s flipping the switch. If you don’t have a mobile website, you’re SO rankings are probably going to tank. They’ve been telling people this for years. Go responsive, you need a mobile-friendly website.
Any event, if you have any questions email us at [email protected]. We’re going to continue to do these videos. We got a lot of positive feedback. If you have questions about this video or again, any other video, shoot us an email. Feel free to fill out the free website analysis form too. We’ll do a free website analysis and have a phone call with you and see if there’s anything that we can do to educate you or help you.

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