Everyone at one point or another has encountered a website, either on mobile or desktop, that is incredibly slow. Studies show that users will leave your site if it takes even just more than a few seconds to load. This should be reason enough to prioritize your website’s site speed. To put it straight forward, a slow website will prevent users from converting on your website.
Site Speed and SEO
Aside from user experience, site speed is now a ranking factor for Google. A site with that is slow to load, will not rank as well as a fast website, with all other ranking considerations equal. Why is this so? First off, Google wants to rank websites that create flawless experiences for users. A slow website provides a poor user experience.
From a technical SEO perspective, a slow website will prevent bots from crawling your site effectively. Each website has a “crawl budget” from Google. Essentially, this is how often and how long your site will be crawled. Slower sites slow down bots, taking them longer to crawl your site, and in turn affecting indexing in search results.
How Can You Check Site Speed?
Thankfully there are numerous tools one can use to test the speed of your website or webpages. One way is to go to developers.google.com and enter in the URL of the page you wish to test for speed. This will give you a mobile and desktop view of how well the page performs.
Additionally, there are plenty of other free resources online to test website and webpage speed. Sites like pingdom.com and others will provide feedback on the speed of your site.