If your website has not got the love it deserves, you risk missing valuable conversions and traffic: high speed pays! Why? Because both search engines and users care about the speed (performance). For Google, speed is alpha and omega – both paid (Google Ads) and organic searches. Google rarely goes out with concrete numbers around what's good performance, but much indicates that it's a 3-second rule. This means for every additional second beyond these 3 since your load is used, the more negative points will give you the search engines.
Google publicly said that velocity was a ranking factor in 2010 and May 2021 is becoming Core Web Vitals part of their algorithm. A lot of the reason why speed is rewarded is how it affects user experienceSo let's say that this is the same thing as that. Users doing a search are often helpless to click back to the search results page if the page uses multiple seconds to load (this is called page abandonment). Another consequence is that users who are on the website and navigate from side to side will experience slow speed as a continuous irritation, increasing the chances of them leaving the page without returning. If your website has a good performance, it takes less time to get to know your potential customers more quickly.
Many tests have been carried out to show how low speed contributes to fewer conversions, including this one from Kissmetrics demonstrating the relationship between speed and page abandonment:
..and this one showing interesting links between how performance affects buying behaviour:
Finally, the search engine algorithm and the user behaviour are two sides of the same case: the former is a model and a reflection of what users experience as relevant and satisfactory search results. User behaviour, as well as direct and indirect user exposure, has become a more important and real ranking signal in recent years.
What steps can you take to improve the performance of the page? Like most of the measures that can make your website more optimistic in a world where you can no longer ‘down’ up in the search results (as you could in the early 2000s), most performance improvements require a good portion of work without it acting as a deterrent to a developer with good technical insight. Some of the measures are:
- Optimize your images for web. Photoshop and similar software allow you to minimize images using the "save for web" feature. The aim is to minimise the file size, so that the load time drops.
- Use “server side caching” – A html page for an url is created here so that dynamic pages do not need to “build up” a page from scratch each time a url becomes “requested”.
- Minimise the number of http requests. A website will load faster if it waits for fewer such requests. This is done by reducing the number of items to be uploaded each time a new page is visited, such as scripts, styles, sheets and images.
- Build your website based on AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages). AMP is a standard web page framework that allows faster download and rendering at the sides is based on several standardised elements. A probable 2017 scenario is that pages not found in the AMP version are given a significant penalty in the same way as non-mobile pages are currently receiving when you do a Google search on your phone. (See point 4: Hansipetter.info/2016/12/7-seo-trends-tips-2017/)
These are all taken from the many Moz Tips for better performance
Google has created a phenomenal (and free) tool, Google page speed inputs identifying key improvement points related to performance on websites and giving additional instructions on the appropriate measures to be taken.