Are you trying to improve your SEO rankings to boost traffic from Google? How important is pagespeed for SEO in 2024?

There are various ways to improve your SEO rankings. Including building backlinks and writing great content, these might take a great deal of effort and investment. Improvement of pagespeed performance gives a higher return on your effort when compared with other ranking signals.

Don’t worry! If you are not a coder yourself. I would mention solutions that can be implemented by non-coders like you and me.

What is page speed?

Page speed is defined as the duration of the time taken to display all the contents on a page. 

Page speed is one of the most important SEO factors. Increasing loading speed can improve your WordPress website’s rankings, the user experience, and the conversion rate.

To improve the pagespeed scores of your WordPress website, you can either do the optimization manually, which might be a little daunting for most users, or you can take advantage of a few awesome plugins available for free in the WordPress ecosystem. Let’s find out how important is pagespeed for SEO?

How do you measure the page speed of your WordPress website?

There are many tools available to measure website speed scores. A good practice is to use two to three tools to check your PageSpeed score. We can use Google Pagespeed Insight, GTmetrix, RabbitLoader, and Google Lighthouse. to check the Google PageSpeed. 

• Google Pagespeed Insight:

Google PageSpeed Insight provides reports of the user experience of the webpage on both desktop and mobile modes. Google PageSpeed Insight also provides suggestions on how the webpage can be improved. 

It provides the overall performance result based on Core Web Vital metrics like FCP (First Contentful Paint), FID (First Input Delay), LCP (Largest Contentful Paint), CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift), and so on.

A pagespeed score of 90 or above is categorized as a good performance score, whereas a score between 50 and 89 is considered an average score, indicating that the pagespeed score needs to be improved.

If the page speed score of your WordPress website is below 90, then it needs to be optimized.

• GTmetrix:

GTmetrix is an online tool that also provides a website page speed score. It will check the size, loading time, and requests happening, and then provide a score. GTmetrix will also provide suggestions for improving the page speed score.

You can check the overall performance score based on Core Web Vital metrics like First Contentful Paint (FCP), Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), Total Blocking Time (TBT), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS).

• RabbitLoader:

You can check the PageSpeed performance score in RabbitLoader. Also, you can check how much you can improve the page speed score by using their plugin.

RabbitLoader provides the page speed score based on CSS Code, First Contentful Paint, First Meaningful Paint, Images, Speed Index, Time To Interactive, and Total Blocking Time.

How does page speed affect SEO ranking?

Speeding up a WordPress website is crucial for several reasons.

Better user Experience

A faster-loading website can improve user satisfaction. Users will engage with the content of the web page and stay longer on the website if it takes less time to load. 

Lower bounce rate

First, we need to understand the meaning of a lower bounce rate. A lower bounce rate can indicate that the WordPress website’s content is helpful to visitors. 

A slower website means the user experience would suffer, which in turn would result in a higher bounce rate for your website. 

As Google tracks the average time spent on the page by visitors as a ranking factor, this would have a knock-on effect on your SEO ranking as well.

It helps with conversion rates

First, we need to understand what conversion is. Conversion is the process of changing a visitor into a customer. 

If a visitor does not spend time on the website, then the chance of converting to a customer is very low. This may cause a large loss for the brand owner.

How to improve your website page speed (Manual & plugin)

There are various ways you can improve the page speed of the WordPress website.

• Minify HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files:

HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files are fundamental elements of every webpage. HTML creates the webpage, CSS makes the webpage stylish, and JavaScript makes the page interactive. Many coders use unnecessary space, comments, and a large variable name for their own understanding. It will increase the file size.

Large-sized HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files can increase the total blocking time. To reduce the load time, you need to minify CSS, HTML, and JavaScript files by deleting unnecessary spaces, comments, a large variable name, and other unneeded elements.  This will improve the WordPress website loading speed.

You can also use online tools like HTML Minifer and CSS Minifier to optimize your HTML and CSS files. 

• Compress and optimize images:

Images are the most powerful forms of communication. It can convey messages quickly. Without images, your webpage appears dull. Images are the most common reason for slow WordPress websites. It will take a long time to load. 

To improve the website’s performance, you need to reduce the image size as much as possible. You can compress image files with the help of online photo optimization tools like image4.io, imagekit.io, compressor.io, and many more.  It can reduce website loading time. Bonus tip: you can use Image Size Checker by Sitechecker to analyze all the images on your website.

• Use a Content Delivery Network: 

The real-world distance between the server and the user is another common reason for a high loading time. Due to this high distance, it will take a lot of time to load a webpage. This impacts especially international users and users who are accessing from remote areas. 

 A content delivery Content Delivery Network (CDN) reduces the distance between the user and the server by distributing the content across the worldwide server. 

Popular CDNs like Stackpath, Cloudflare, CDN77, and CloudFront take care of all content delivery for you and improve your website performance. 

• Use lazy loading:

lazy loading loads only the images that are above the fold. That means the images are visible in the user’s browser window first. The remaining photos are not loaded until the user scrolls down to them. So, your website’s page speed will increase.

Lazy loading is another option if the WordPress site has a lot of images. Lazy loading can be applied to other media, like videos, as well as page content, like texts and comments.

• Use the cache plugin:

Caching can store static copies of HTML files, CSS stylesheets, JavaScript files, media files, and images.  Caching is used to reduce the loading time of a website and speed up its page.

You can use popular caches like WP Rocket, RabbitLoader, WP Super Cache, SiteGround Optimizer, LiteSpeed Cache, and many more.

• Don’t use too many plugins:

WordPress is a highly flexible and adaptable CMS (content management system). The main advantage of WordPress is that you can use several plugins.

The plugin has its own features and code. So, your WordPress website loading time will automatically increase, especially when using multiple plugins.so it will negatively affect your PageSpeed performance.

To increase the website’s page speed, it is more beneficial to use fewer plugins. You need to choose plugins that can give you a better result. Instead of too many plugins, you can use a WordPress plugin like RabbitLoader.

RabbitLoader will help you optimize images and minify HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files. By using the RabbitLoader plugin, you will get the world’s best content delivery network (CDN), with over 300+ locations distributed in 47 countries around the globe.

Conclusion

In this article, we’ve discussed how important PageSpeed is pagespeed for SEO and learned how to improve your WordPress website’s pagespeed performance and how pagespeed affects the SEO rankings. To improve the pagespeed scores of your WordPress website, you can either do the optimization manually, which requires knowledge of coding, or you can take advantage of the plugins that are available in the WordPress ecosystem.

Now you need to decide which plugin you are going to use to make your WordPress website faster.