Are you an IT professional or a website owner and want to get your website in the right SEO position? Believe us, you can do it! It’s easier than you think; you just have to keep in mind a few basic conditions. Follow us!
The importance of positioning factors
For your website to be visited by many people, to stay on the site and to achieve a reaction from them (such as a purchase or recommendation), your site must have specific characteristics. Which are the most important ones? Here they are:
- A secure URL means an encrypted data transfer between the browser and your web server, which can be easily found by Google robots.
- That has an affinity with mobile devices.
- Users need to recommend your website and visit it frequently, which will enhance its visibility and popularity.
- You must have an optimized network.
- The user experience is pleasant and useful.
- Your commercial information is real and of quality.
- And we leave for the grand finale, the super important page loading speed, which determines whether a user enters and stays on our website.
You might also be interested in SEO positioning factors.
The importance of loading speed
Why is it so important to take care of this factor? You can imagine it because you have experienced it, but let us explain: users currently have faster and more advanced devices. 4G and 5G phones are more common, and people, within their accelerated pace of life, prefer a precise speed of response in their searches. If your site is not displayed almost immediately to the Internet user, your audience will type the following address; you will lose a query, and the visit time will be minimal so that Google will penalize your position.
On the other hand, loading speed also affects the percentage of sales made on your site, especially with mobile devices, which encourage impulse purchases with eye-catching advertising campaigns. Another important factor for your potential customers is their data usage; they won’t want to consume it on a slow page.
How do you know if your online page’s loading speed is good or bad, and how can you optimize it? Google has created a super useful tool to analyze your website quickly and evaluate the time it takes to display it completely with its images, links, and videos. The tool gives you a rating, like in school, that places you in a range from 0 to 49, bad; from 50 to 89, less bad; and from 90 to 100, satisfactory.
Learn about and access Google’s PageSpeed tool.
It is completely free and easy to use. Follow the steps outlined below to obtain valuable information for your website.
- Type “page speed” into your favourite browser.
- Choose the first result shown. It appears as PageSpeed Insights – Google Developers.
- Upon entering, a very simple interface will appear, and you will be asked to enter the URL of the website or the name of your domain.
- Click “Analyze”.
- You will have two assessments: one for mobile devices and one for computers.
- Review the report completely and carefully.
And now, we explain the report to you!
The page is divided into two parts. The first provides information regarding field data and the source summary. The second, more important part includes elements of web loading; despite looking complex, it is easy to understand. Follow this guide to get the most information and find it useful.
Experimental data
Displays data from experiments showing digital imaging time, activity, and non-use.
- First Contentful Paint.
- Speed Index.
- Largest Contentful Paint.
- Time to Interactive.
- Total Blocking Time.
- Cumulative Layout Shift.
Opportunities
It focuses on opportunities. These are the suggestions you can work on to facilitate faster page loading and give you the estimated savings in seconds. Below are some common opportunities that may appear:
- Remove render-blocking plugins.
- Reduce initial server response time.
- Publish images with next-generation formats.
- Encodes images efficiently.
Diagnostics
It is for diagnostics. It complements the information about the performance of your website. We show you some examples that you can find in this section:
- Make sure the text remains visible while the font loads.
- Minimizes the work of the main thread.
- Avoid excessive DOM size.
- Avoid chaining critical requests.
- Avoid major design changes.
One nice thing about this tool is that it has a pulldown menu, giving you examples of making the indicated correction. In addition, it prioritizes the findings by showing a red triangle when one is critical, an orange square if it is serious, and a grey circle if it is just a recommendation.
Audits approved
Audits passed. Finally, here you will find the good points of your website. Here are some examples that can be found:
- Use an appropriate size for images.
- Enables understanding of the text.
- Use animated content.
- Pre-load key requests.
Can I improve my score if I need to be above 90?
Of course. The obvious thing to do is to improve what you’ve detected in the opportunities and diagnostics. Still, in a general and quick way, we recommend you eliminate all the useless plugins, use an add-on that automatically improves the download speed, and verify its correct installation because if you make a mistake, the result will be disastrous. Improve your images, either manually or with an optimizer, and finally, ensure that your hosting provider has a high capacity.
Finally, remember that your website’s final evaluation should be somewhere between the tool’s rating and the user’s own browsing experience. Don’t worry if you don’t get a score close to 100; find a balance between positioning and user experience.
