Advancement in digital technology has changed many things in the business world. Today, brands are not relying on TV commercials to create awareness of their products and services. They are using SEO to increase their visibility, connect with their customers, generate leads, and increase sales. By using the right SEO (Search Engine Optimization) strategies, you can increase the competitiveness of your business and revenue.
Optimizing your website’s page loading speed is one of the on-page SEO strategies that you can use to increase your ranking on SERPs. Note that among the algorithms that search engines use to rank websites are the dwell time, and bounce rate. To increase your dwell time and reduce your website’s bounce rate, your page loading speed must be less than four seconds. Here are the ways you can optimize the loading speed of your website.
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1. Compress your files and images
Did you know that images take 60% of the bytes loaded on every page? Well, now you know the reason why your pages take so long to load. To solve this, you might want to get rid of the images that you don’t need. However, do not remove all of them as they are essential for your SEO content strategy. The remaining images should be compressed if they exceed 150 bytes. Keeping the sizes of your pictures down will definitely improve the performance of your site. In a recent study, it has been found that around 11.3% of all search results have featured snippet and they are stealing a lot of clicks from the #1 site. In 2019, if you want to rank higher and drive organic traffic to your website then don’t just aim to grab the #1 spot.
2. Removing redirects
Landing page redirects can reduce a page loading speed. There is, however, more to how exactly redirects affect a page loading speed. Note that your first query will take you to the website, from where you will have to wait to be redirected to another page. Redirects increase time waiting to access the content. And it will take longer before the response cycle is complete, unlike when you land directly on the page you want.
3. Enable browser caching
Every time you visit a website, the elements of the page you visit are temporarily stored in caches. This means that in a subsequent visit, the page will load faster as the browser will not have to send a HTTP request to the server.
Enabling browser cache will help your visitors to get access to pages faster as their browsers will not have to redownload components such as stylesheets, javascript, files, and images, which takes about 2.4 seconds. This will make the page loading speed for subsequent visits faster and improve the experience of the users.
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SEO trends keep changing every year. If you don’t follow the latest trend, then it will become difficult for you to optimize your site at an advanced level. Check out here the latest trends that will help you to improve your overall SEO game.
Reducing server response time is yet another way you can improve the loading speed of your page. Some of the factors that increase your server response time include lack of enough memory, slow database queries, and slow routing. You should take care of these issues to improve the response time. Optimizing your page loading speed can positively impact your website’s ranking on search engine results pages. Reducing redirects, compressing files, and leveraging browser caching will significantly improve your website’s speed.
