Making sure your site loads quickly is one of the most important things you can do for your site. Not only does it improve user experience and increase conversion, but it can also have a positive impact on rankings. In this video we discuss how you can understand more about your sites speed and the simple actions you can take to improve load times.
Done with this one? View the next video: Understanding Your sites Links & Trust
Looking for the first video in the series? Find it here: Making Sure Your Sites Content Can Be Indexed
Hi, this is Chris from Dejan SEO. In this tip I’m going to show you how to monitor and improve your site’s load time and performance.
Site performance or load times can have a big impact on user experience affecting how long they’ll likely spend on your site and even conversion rates. Google has also confirmed they use load times as a ranking factor. Many site owners don’t even consider site performance, but it can be one of the factors that make your site seem the most professional and engaging for users. There are loads of tools available for monitoring site performance. Two of the most commonly used are Google Analytics and the Google Page Speed Tester Tool.
The only tool you’ll need to have ready in advance for this video is Google Analytics. Site performance and load time can seem complicated at first, but once you’ve got the hang of the basics everything else begins to make sense. One of the best ways in monitoring your site’s performance is through Google Analytics, which can help you monitor your page load times across different devices, locations, and operating systems. Just open your Analytics account and in the left menu click Behavior, then Site Speed, and then for this example we’ll start in the overview section.
Analytics site speed monitoring can be useful for spotting where there might be problems that need urgent attention. For example, we can see if some browsers are performing worse than others. This can tell us if there’s a design issue that’s not being picked up and allows us to perform cross-browser testing. We can also see if a particular country loads pages more slowly than others. If a country is important to our strategy, this might suggest we should look at using a server-based in that location or a content delivery network. We can also see how pages are performing compared to the site average. Poor performance might indicate too many or too large images. Have a play around with the data and you’ll likely find some areas on your site that need improvement.
The Google Speed Page Testing Tool makes it easy to see how your site is performing and provides suggestions for changes, which will help you improve load times. Simply enter your URL and click Analyze. You’ll see your page’s score and a number of improvements prioritized according to estimated impact. Although making improvements to page load times can include some in depth technical issues, there are also some easy things you can do to make a difference.
First, make sure your images are optimized using images no larger than is necessary and in the correct format. You can also reduce the number of files that needed to be loaded on the page by combining some images and code files and also reducing any unnecessary images. Making sure JavaScript code, things like social buttons, is put near the bottom of the page in the code can help the page appear to load faster for users. You can also use something called browser caching which saves some files in the user’s browser to make moving around the site faster. If your business operates in multiple countries, you could look at using a content delivery network like CloudFlare, which basically stores your website’s information closer to the users. Using a content delivery network might sound complicated, but it’s actually fairly simple to implement and can lead to big improvements in your site’s load times. But if you’re not sure about something, speak to your developer.
That was our quick tip on how to monitor and improve your site’s performance and load time. If you want to use the tips in this video, you can get started with the action shown here. You can also find supporting articles on HubSpot and the Dejan SEO website.
