Is website loading speed important for SEO?

How to check site loading speed?

To check your site's loading speed, it is recommended to use a tool that analyzes both the mobile and desktop versions of your site. It takes into account content loading time, image and video optimization, cache and compression usage, the number of HTTP requests, and other parameters that affect page performance.

What is the optimal download speed?

The optimal download speed is considered to be at least 50% according to the performance assessment tool. If a site receives less than 50%, this may lead to a decrease in search rankings. It is important to consider not only the main page, but also internal pages (for example, product cards or categories). If your site scores below 50%, it's worth taking steps to improve its speed.

For desktop versions of sites, the indicators are as follows:

High speed – less than 1 second; Optimal – from 1 to 2.1 seconds; Low – more than 2.1 seconds.

For mobile devices, the numbers are slightly lower, since weaker internet is taken into account:

High speed – less than 1.6 seconds; Optimal – from 1.6 to 3 seconds; Low – more than 3 seconds.

How to increase website loading speed for Google?

• Reduce the number of HTTP requests. Combine CSS and JS files into one, and also minify these files by removing extra spaces.
• Compress images. On mobile versions of the site you should not use high-resolution images. Download all the images, compress them and upload them back.
• Reduce the number of plugins if your site runs on a CMS. Redundant plugins increase the number of HTTP requests.
• Use AMP pages. These pages allow the user to load the site almost instantly. They are optimized for fast loading on mobile devices.
• Update your PHP version. Contact your web developer to install the latest version of PHP (7 and above), which can also improve site speed.
• Use lazyload for images. Lazy loading of images allows images to be loaded only when they appear in the user's visibility area, which reduces the initial load on the page.

Try to implement all these recommendations and recheck your site loading speed. You will be able to see how these changes have a positive effect on website promotion in search engines.

If you have questions or need help improving the SEO of your website, you can contact the SEO studio "SEO COMPUTER". Write to us by email info@seo.computer.

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