How to Improve Your Website Speed to Boost Your SEO

If I were to type your URL in my browser on my desktop AND my phone, how quickly would your website load? If it’s more than two seconds, I’m probably bouncing. That’s how long you have to keep potential leads you attract from search results. Your website speed isn’t something to ignore. 

Website speed and SEO work together to give people the best experience on your website and prove to search engines that you’re a trusted source to send traffic to. But sometimes, we unintentionally have elements on our website that slow pages down, which hurts the user experience.

So, let’s chat about how to see how fast your website currently loads and how to fix common website speed issues to boost your SEO.

Why Website Speed Matters for SEO

You know how annoying it is when a website takes forever to load? Like, longer than two seconds (that’s the expectation of your customers, by the way.) And if it’s taking too long, you decide you can find somewhere else to get what you need and bounce back to search results.

Yeah… that’s what you don’t want to happen.

Not only are you upsetting potential leads and clients, but Google doesn’t like to see this happen, either. Its main goal is to provide a positive experience for its users. And when they bounce off your website because it takes too long to load, well, that’s not a great experience. Over time, Google will stop sending traffic your way. All your SEO efforts will be for nothing if you can’t get people to land and stay on your website.

So, I’d say website speed is SUPER important for your SEO. Fast websites tend to rank higher and get more engagement. 

Website speed isn’t something you can trick Google into thinking you have a quick website when you don’t (not that you should EVER try to trick Google unless you want to be banned 😅). When Google crawls your website to index your pages for search results, it knows exactly how long it takes for each page to load.

There’s no getting around it. You need to address your website speed to see positive results and traffic from search engines.

How to Measure Your Current Website Speed

I always recommend the tool PageSpeed Insights for measuring website speed. It’s completely free, and you can use it for your website and your clients’ websites! 

Simply paste your website URL into the search bar and click ‘analyze.’ Scanning your website on both mobile and desktop will take a few seconds. Toggle between the two to see what could be slowing your website down on both devices (they usually have different scores!) We know Google has started mobile-first indexing, which means it will use the mobile version of your website first when indexing your website for search engines. If you want your pages to rank on Google, your mobile site has to be top-notch, so don’t forget to review the mobile tab!

Once the scan is complete, you’ll see four categories: 

• Performance
• Accessibility
• Best Practices
• SEO

You can click each category to see a better breakdown of the areas you’re doing well and passing the test and where you need to address potential issues.

What did you find slowing down your website? I need to address some things, too! Things constantly change, so it’s good to check your website speed with this tool every quarter to see if there are things you need to update.

Tips to Improve Your Website Speed

I’ll admit that some of the flagged diagnostics are gibberish to me. Literally no clue what some of these things mean. Luckily, PageSpeed Insights is usually pretty good about linking to help articles that explain it a little better. You can also directly Google the issue and find other resources on how to fix it. Some things do require coding – you may or may not decide it’s worth investing in that. 

I typically fix what I can and see how it improves my score. I want to get as close to a green score as possible. You’ll probably never have 100% in all four categories, so go ahead and get that perfectionism mindset out of here 😉 Just do your best! 

Here are some things that I do that make a huge difference in my website speed.

Compress Images

Images are one of the biggest things that slow down your website. Images, videos, and special graphics or elements often have large file sizes, which take a long time to load. And when you have a lot, pages really struggle to get all the content to show up quickly. 

To update image sizes, you can manually download the image from your media library, use a compress tool to reduce the file size, reupload the image, and delete the old one. The process kinda sucks. OR you can install a plug-in to do the work for you. There are several out there that you can look into. Responsive Images is one of the plug-ins Google recommends.

Moving forward, every time you add a new photo to your website, run it through Tinify or Compress JPEG first. This will reduce the file size without compromising the quality of the image—it’s amazing how much it reduces! 

Make Platform Updates

You know how you ignore updates on your computer because they’re annoying and make you restart it and close hundreds of open tabs? But then your computer freezes or crashes, and you lose everything anyway? It’s better just to make the update on your own time so you can prep for it. 

The same goes for your website, except making updates will help your page speed, too. Update your hosting platform, themes, plug-ins, and other platforms when they become available. They often fix problems you might not even know about, including page speed issues. So, just make the update!

Remove Unused Media

Unused media takes up just as much space on your website as the media you use. Deleting images, videos, and plug-ins you don’t use anymore will clear up some space. Not to mention, your media library will be a little more organized!

There’s so much more you can do to improve your website speed. Use PageSpeed Insights to see what you specifically need to do to help your website load faster.

Fixing Website Page Load Times

I know this can feel overwhelming. It will take some time to work through the issues PageSpeed Insights flags, but each update you make improves your website and someone’s experience. Tackle it one step at a time, and you’ll start to see some big changes!