Have you ever noticed how quickly Google displays your search results? Yes, it’s always incredibly fast because the largest search engine truly believes in the importance of user experience.
Why is that so?
According to the research, almost half of website visitors expect your page to load in less than two seconds. Another study revealed that the 1-second delay in load time means 11% loss of page views. In such circumstances, page load time obviously becomes a crucial factor of website credibility.
But there is another important question to answer here: How load speed affects your Google ranking? In this post, we will show you how Google deals with slow websites and what to do to improve your site’s status.
Google Speed Update
Speed has been an important search ranking factor for almost a decade now. However, Google used this indicator mainly for desktop searches and didn’t really pay attention to mobile browsing – at least not until recently.
Earlier this year, Google Webmaster Central Blog published a post entitled Using page speed in mobile search ranking, announcing that page speed will be a ranking factor for mobile searches as of July 2018.
Here’s what they said: “The Speed Update, as we’re calling it, will only affect pages that deliver the slowest experience to users and will only affect a small percentage of queries. It applies the same standard to all pages, regardless of the technology used to build the page”.
The search engine giant encouraged developers to “think broadly about how performance affects a user’s experience of their page and to consider a variety of user experience metrics”. In other words, Google told webmasters to improve page load speed or else they are going to face a significant downfall in search ranking.
Given the fact that Google holds more than 90% of the entire search engine market share, we strongly recommend you to fulfill its expectations and invest in advancements that will make your website faster and more efficient.
Test website page load time
Before you start working on website improvements, you need to test pageload timing. Bearing in mind the stats we mentioned above, your goal should be to get pageload time below 3 seconds. Anything above that will minimize your chances to rank high in Google searches.
The easiest way to test your website is by using online tools. There are dozens of options out there, so we decided to cut the long story short and show you our top 3 solutions:
Google PageSpeed Insights
PageSpeed Insights reports on the real-world performance of a page for mobile and desktop devices and provides suggestions on how that page may be improved. You only need to enter a webpage URL to get the results. You will see two types of indicators called speed and optimization scores.
Website speed can be Fast, Average, or Slow, while optimization may range from 0 to 100 points. Besides that, Google PageSpeed Insights will give you optimization suggestions. For instance, it could suggest you optimize images and leverage browser caching.
Pingdom
Pingdom is a page speed monitoring solution that analyzes multiple performance indicators. It can give you all pageload-related data in less than a minute including performance grade, page size, load time, and many other features.
Pingdom also checks how long it took for HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to load and in what order. All results come in the form of comprehensive but intuitive visualizations. You can test Pingdom for free and then buy one of its packages starting from $10 a month.
GTmetrix
Similar to Google PageSpeed Insights, GTmetrix gives you a report on how well your site loads and provides actionable recommendations on how to optimize it. This tool shows you page load details such as time, size, and the number of requests.
Besides the overall speed score, GTmetrix also indicates how well you are doing compared to other websites. Another thing that makes this tool so useful is the fact that it creates a list of actionable recommendations, prioritized by how much they affect your page speed.
How to improve page load speed
You’ve probably figured out by now that dozens of different factors influence the overall page load speed. This makes optimization process much more complicated, but we can highlight the most important actions you should take in this field:
Enable browser caching:
When someone visits your website for the first time, all elements are stored in a temporary storage. If you enable storing in the user’s cache, only a few more components require downloading next time they visit your page.
Reduce image size:
Images are usually large files that slow down page speed. If you reduce them, you will probably minimize page load times.
Defer JavaScript loading:
WordPress offers a variety of plugins that allow you to defer JavaScript loading. This way, you prevent the loading of some files until other webpage elements have loaded. The process is therefore simplified and much faster.
Choose the right hosting option:
Don’t save money by selecting the shared hosting option if you run a serious business. Instead, find a reliable hosting option such as VPS or dedicated server.
Recommended web host: Cloudways
Woblogger has been a proud customer since 2016. We noticed an immediate 83% speed improvement the day we moved. Without using a CDN, an 83% speed improvement is pretty remarkable.

Read: seo-is-going-mobile-here-are-the-things-that-you-need-to-know/” target=”_blank” rel=”noopener noreferrer”>SEO Is Going Mobile: Here Are the Things That You Need To Know
Run a compression audit:
Smaller files demand less loading time. Therefore, you can improve loading times by compressing HTML, CSS, JavaScript, plain text, and XML files.
Lazy loading:
One more way to enhance website performance is through lazy loading. The procedure allows you to load the top of the page faster than the rest of the page. It improves user experience because visitors immediately see the upper parts of your webpage, while others get more time for additional loading.
You may also like: 7 Tips to Speed up Your WordPress Blog
Conclusion
Google’s search engine algorithm has always been perplexing and mysterious. It consists of numerous factors that strongly impact website search ranking, but no one can be 100% sure about them all. However, we do know that page load speed is becoming increasingly important because it’s a new ranking component for mobile searches as of July 2018.
If you want to ensure a more efficient online performance, you must follow new requirements and adapt website according to Google’s criteria. This post showed you how Google deals with slow websites and what to do to improve your site’s status. Our tips will make your website run faster, so don’t be afraid of giving them a try immediately!
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Great post for site speed and importance of the website speed as SEO point of view..
It is very important ranking factor as when someone visit on your blog through search engine and your site taking more time to open, in this case mostly users can leave your site without visiting single page on your blog.. I use the super cache plugin to improve the speed of the website.
it’s good to keep on researching.. would you believe i’m just finding out about this.. thanks for this article
wow.. just got to kow about this… i’ll work on it
Thanks for letting me know importance of the website speed…
I am Blogger and know that how website speed can effect your site ranking in google. I had problem of site speed with my new blog, then i buy the premium Wp Rocket Plugin, Now it is working fine and also getting the good result in SERP
Thanks for sharing website load time..
I am also a blogger and know importance of site speed for ranking. when your site is taking too much time to load then user can leave your site.. Improve the speed of site by purchasing the light theme….
this article is an appealing wealth of informative data that is interesting and well written.i commend your hard work on this and thank you for this information. you have got what is take it attention.
Thanks for sharing importance of the website speed in google ranking..
I think, it is very important ranking factor as when you site load slowly in browser, mostly users can leave your site without visiting any page. i always use the super case plugin to improve the website speed…
Nice letting us to know this, thanks
CSS sprites is a technology to convert multiple images into one big image.This will reduce the number of concurrent connections, and your website will load faster.
I would hope that both SEO guys and developers would know about the importance of website speed with regards to user experience though.If it took 10 seconds to load the site at the top of the SERP and 3 seconds to load the site that holds a lower position,I know which site I’d rather be browsing and I don’t think it would take long for me to jump ship.
Having more pages will increase the page load time?
I using MaxCDN + W3 total cache plugin to speed up my site, because I know nothing about JavaScript loading. But the result is not good.
Great information, the way which i fixed my own website loading speed for mobile version is just that i use the amp, hope is good?
Great Work , this is a very useful way to build quick traffic on your website , thanks to made my work easy.
Based on my years of experience I can say that speed matters. CDN is only possible solution for this.
Great article. Quite informative. Thanks for sharing.