Does my site speed affect SEO?

The website speed determines the timeframe of a server response, how fast the content is loaded and how much time it needs to be ready for use, and how much time average users spend on a page. This ranking factor is so vital that Google makes it one of its top priorities when evaluating what to show first. If it takes forever to load, it will be penalized by Google and the visitors who will leave in the first three seconds. So the algorithm will mark it as less important and thus less visible. Optimizing the website speed is so beneficial that Google prioritizes a fast, responsive server over relevant content, taking more time to load. The standard applies to both desktop and mobile versions.

Does blogging improve SEO?

If we consider proper SEO optimization, blogs are an unavoidable part of it. Bloggs itself doesn’t affect ranking, but it is an opportunity to incorporate a variety of factors that boost visibility and improve website authority. They provide a method to target a specific audience by providing additional information and increasing organic traffic. A blog post should be relevant to website content and serves further explanation of the desired topic. When creating a blog post, the content must address, resolve and provide relevant information. So throwing random stories and misleading the visitor will do more harm than good as Google monitors the time spent on a specific post. The algorithm assumes that if the user leaves quickly, the page hasn’t satisfied the searcher’s intent and will lower the authority accordingly.

How long will it take to see the effects of SEO?

There is no straight answer to this question. SEO is a long run, a test of endurance, discipline, and consistency. The strategy undoubtfully works, but the time frame of concrete results is a matter of dispute as it depends on many factors.

PageRank is a complex algorithm that uses several points to evaluate the website’s importance. Google’s “brain” is responsible for reading all the site metrics and deciding how to rank accordingly. Although it is not visible to the public anymore, it’s still very much operational. Every SEO measure and optimization addresses PageRank to fulfill its standards. However, the most crucial element examined by PageRank is the quality and quantity of the links leading to a website.

What Is domain authority?

Domain Authority (DA) is a metric for forecasting how frequently a domain will appear on search engine results pages. It is possible to examine the DA to understand how visitors view a specific website. It uses a score between 1 and 100, evaluating through 40 factors a potential search engine performance. The sheer complexity of the DA assessment makes it hard to define what a good or bad score is, but one thing is sure a website must have a better score than the competition to outperform.

What exactly does SEO mean?

Enhancing or improving a website according to search engine requirements to increase exposure and organic traffic is a process known as SEO, short for Search Engine Optimization. SEO is one of the best cost-effective digital marketing strategies for gathering organic leads that consists of multiple operations established to improve the website’s ranking.

What are SEO components?

SEO is a multidimensional discipline demanding all pieces of the puzzle to work in perfect symbiosis to produce results.

What does On-page SEO or On-site SEO incorporate?

On-page SEO is the process that covers everything written or added onto the site pages along with the overall user experience. Google is continuously developing its ability to comprehend what is happening on a website page. On-page SEO aims to optimize website pages, allowing Google’s algorithm to scan through efficiently and understand the content. The algorithm will assess titles, graphics, relevant content, Internal and External hyperlinks, the HTML code, data structure, and how easy it is to navigate.

Maybe it is better to ask who doesn’t need SEO. Perhaps a tiny local grocery store with fruits and vegetables supplying a small part of a block is a perfect example. Everybody else needs SEO. Since buyer and consumer habits have changed immensely in the last 20 years with the internet evolution, the providers of services/products have no other option but to keep up with them. As a result, the internet has become a powerful, affordable, and necessary tool for advertising. It is so powerful, with limitless possibilities, that a company can have the same amount of exposure as a brand in a Super Bowl commercial, spending incomparably less money. These benefits have created massive competition among businesses, and everyone is trying to get their share. As a result of that number of competing offers, search engines have raised the bar by constantly adding new standards to allow only the most quality websites to rank well. The standards have become so complex that they are responsible for creating an entirely new niche of SEO-providing services. So nowadays, entrepreneurs with serious intentions and success on their minds have the task of finding a trustworthy, reliable, and competent SEO agency. Otherwise, it risks entangling in a vast subject, thus spending less time working on a primary goal, business development.

How to Make Your Mobile Site Load Faster – Best Practices

30. Dec. 2022 | Written by Daniela C.

You may be reading this post on your smartphone. You also know how frustrating it is when a website loads slowly on a mobile device. How many times have you left such sites and gone to others? Probably in most cases. That is precisely why the loading speed of your website on mobile devices is one of the critical factors for the success of your website. How to make your mobile site load quickly, we reveal below.

Why Mobile Speed Matters So Much

The rapid development of technology has freed us from dependence on static computers and enabled more effortless access to the necessary information via mobile devices. Today, more than 70% of internet searches come from mobile phones. Mobile users are usually on the go and want to get information anytime, anywhere. More importantly, they want to get them quickly. Google states that if your website takes more than five seconds to load, 90% of your potential visitors will leave immediately. Even a one-second page load delay results in 11% fewer views, a dramatic 16% drop in user satisfaction, and a 7% conversion loss. That may be different from what you want.

In 2019, Google set another technical task before us when it introduced the mobile-first index. That means all factors displayed on the mobile site – speed, user experience, etc. – are the main factors for ranking on search engines. The moment is approaching when it will be more important how your site looks and functions on mobile phones than on computers. Mobile-first.

So, you should never take the loading speed of your mobile site lightly.

If you want to:

you have a high click-through rate
low bounce rate
good conversion

You can try the following methods to speed up your mobile site.

Choose a fast web hosting

Good hosting makes the difference. No matter how well you’ve optimized your mobile site, if the hosting servers take too long to respond, your site will load slowly on mobile devices, leading to a poor user experience. Always take care of the server’s location – if there are none near you, it will delay your mobile site’s loading.

That’s why you always look for good web hosting in your country or region. You can supplement your hosting with a CDN if the servers are too far away. CDN is a global network of servers that delivers data quickly, using cache servers and PoP “access points” that are geographically closest to the user.

If you are building a WordPress website, look for good WordPress hosts with servers optimized for CMS (Content Management System). The same applies to e-commerce websites, which need more processor power.

Compress everything that you can

File compression helps increase page speed by saving bandwidth. One way to compress files is Gzip compression. You can also run most codes through the minification process, reducing the final transfer file size. However, these methods require more work to compress images. Images are often to blame for the slow loading of your mobile site. It would be best if you optimized them specifically for mobile devices, i.e., reducing them proportionally so that the content is readable on small screens.

Images usually take up a lot of space on a web server, so the designer must deliver them to the developer in the most compressed format possible without compromising the image’s appearance. Consider using a responsive images protocol or an image server for large images to look great on a mobile device’s entire screen and load quickly. Of course, you can always reduce the number of images on your mobile site.

Implement caching at all levels

Implementing caching on a mobile site has enormous performance benefits. Mobile browsers can “remember” the pages you visit and save the information on your mobile device for later use. Websites often contain tons of text, graphics, images, and videos that need to be loaded. And that can take time.

Caching makes these elements automatically available. When users visit a page, browsers will look in their local memory to see if they already have the file needed to build the page. It helps browsers and bots identify what to reuse and what to download each time again. Thanks to this, the loading time is automatically improved.

Keep redirects down

Redirects slow down your mobile site because the server needs time to find and download the requested document on the original link. The clock is ticking as your users “travel” from one page to another. The more time they spend waiting for the page to load, the more dissatisfied they become.

Technically speaking, redirects create additional HTTP requests and thus reduce the loading speed of your website. Extra seconds can increase the bounce rate, so if you want to keep the attention of your visitors, keep redirects down.

Minimize HTTP Requests

HTTP requests are one of the biggest killers of site speed. These requests occur when the browser requests HTML or CSS files from the server. The more elements such as images, scripts, or Flash you have on your mobile site, the more requests there will be and the longer the loading time will be.

Of course, images, etc., are necessary on your site, and HTTP requests must be made. But you can reduce them by simplifying the design. You can reduce the number of elements on the page, remove unnecessary functions, make your copy concise, and eliminate overlapping forms.

If possible, use CSS instead of images. If you must have scripts, put them at the bottom of the page. This way, the HTML content will load first, and your users won’t have to wait for the script to finish downloading. Keep your web design simple but tasteful – this will make your site easier and faster to load on a mobile device.

Use only the Plugins you need

It does not necessarily mean that many plugins will cause problems with the speed of your mobile site. However, poorly coded plugins and those that use a lot of data can negatively affect performance. So you have to be very careful which plugins you install. You need to find the perfect number of plugins to use. That, of course, depends primarily on the type of your mobile site.

Before you decide on a new plugin, be cautious that it can slow down your mobile site by sending additional HTTP requests and adding DB queries. Some plugins also require customized scripts, which can load extra JS files on the page. We recommend you always first look at the reviews for a plugin or consult your hosting provider.

Build Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMPs)

AMP (Accelerated Mobile Page) is a user interface developed by Google in cooperation with Twitter with the aim of a faster and better user experience on mobile pages. We are talking about simplified HTML, which contributes to reducing the page size and, therefore, affects the loading time.

AMPs aim to speed up web loading on mobile devices so that it uses less processing power and fewer internet data. Although you can use AMPs for any website, they are especially suitable for digital publications and blogs that want to provide a speed reading experience.

Another advantage of AMP is that it is effortless to implement — all you need is a WordPress plugin for page conversion. Activating this Google project on your web mobile site pages will not only make it load quickly, but at the same time, it will look great, regardless of the device or distribution platform.

Create a Page load Strategy

As search engines try to mimic humans, they experience web pages the same way you do. One of the best things you can do to speed up your mobile site is to understand what is critical to the experience of users and bots in the first seconds they are on your site. It is primarily information in the page’s head tag, text, and images.

Anything interactive on the page quickly engages visitors, so most JavaScript doesn’t need to be loaded initially. JavaScript is particularly slow and bulky to load. To ensure that loading JavaScript doesn’t negatively affect the user and bot experience, ideally, you want first to load something that users can view, then load the JavaScript in the background.

Improve Latency With a Mobile CDN

CDN (Content Delivery Network) can significantly relieve the server and speed up your mobile site. CDN can store images and scripts on its distribution network of servers, and the web server closest to the client delivers the content. In this way, a visitor from Germany will receive content from a local European web server.

And the one from China will receive data directly from Asian servers, not from your server in the USA. So this eliminates latency and, as a result, improves the performance of your mobile site.

Do your Mobile SEO well.

The Google Mobile First Index uses mobile sites as the basis for ranking. If you want to stand out from the competition by improving the user experience of your visitors, speeding up your mobile site should be a top priority. Don’t lose another potential client due to slow loading – speed up your mobile site and welcome your visitors with open arms.

Written by Daniela C.