You may already be aware that page load speed is extremely important for user experience, especially on mobile. However, did you know that it also affects SEO? As it is a competitive search engine, Google wants its users to have the best possible experience; for this reason, Google punishes websites with slow loading times. To help, we have put together a few easy things you can do to make your website faster.
Benchmark
It might sound obvious, but the first step to improving your loading times is to check how fast your website is already. As an SEO company, we recommend using PageSpeed Insights, a free service provided by Google. Not only will it measure how fast your website is, but it will also provide useful tips to further optimise the pages. As an example, we ran a quick speed check for our website.
As you can see, the Lightflows website has excellent optimisation for both mobile and Desktop, but that is to be expected.
Reduce Those Images
In our experience, one of the main culprits to slow loading times is oversized images. While any image on your website should be of high quality, huge image sizes WILL slow down your website, especially if you have multiple images on one page. Luckily, there’s an easy fix. We recommend using a free image compression website like Kraken. Once the images have been compressed, simply replace the large images with the small ones.
Turn Off Useless Plugins
You may find your website is full of plugins you no longer use, especially if you operate a WordPress site. More than one SEO company have found that just a few extra plugins can account for up to 86.7% of your page load speed. Again, the solution is simple: just go through your website and remove what you don’t need, you’d be surprised the difference it makes.
Of course, this is just the easy stuff. As an experienced SEO company, we can help you make a true impact on your SEO by implementing all kinds of strategies, like Google AMP. Get in touch today by dropping us a message or giving us a call on 01483 688480.