Site speed as believed before is one of the reasons why you are ranking but that is not 100% true, because the real reason why site speed matters is for your bounce rate to lessen and definitely for conversion.
Nowadays, it is not just because you are ranking due to tons of content on your site, user experience is a big part of it and slow website is an experience bummer. Site speed is one of the measurements used in usability and have a big impact in experience and site conversion, it also affects your site’s bounce rate which is a sign of people being displeased on the performance of your site and etc.
So how can you improve your site speed?
- First you have to know why your site is slow, have an audit and identify where you can improve, and to do that you can use gtmetrix, Pingdom or google lighthouse.
- Image Optimization is a big part of speeding up your site, 100KB and below is the sweet spot image file size and almost every device anywhere can load this file fast. You can use tools like Imagify.io to compress your images and keep its image quality.
- Code compression, where you can compress your html, css and javascript files by removing excess spaces which will lessen its file size, you can use the tool on this site to do it. https://htmlcompressor.com/compressor/
- Utilization of Content Delivery Network, where static contents are hosted on a network of content delivery system and file storage buckets such as in amazon cloud, google cloud or the more common and easier to setup cloudflare. Files are loaded faster when they are in content delivery system, and it also help maintain high content availability.
- Setup Caching both on your database and object or static contents such as images, videos and the like, caching lets your user’s web browser to save a chunk of your data and content to load it faster the next time they access your site, though you have to strategically set your header expires to make sure that new contents are delivered to your users when they are available.
- Get a good hosting company, have a hosting company that have a fast server and connectivity to all telco and internet provider specially on your target geolocation for your services and products served on your website. You may get a hosting from Z.com which is fast and reliable signup using the link https://web.z.com/ph/cloud-vps/php600 and receive Php600 credit for VPS hosting service!
Anyhow conversion doesn’t just rely on speed, it will also be good to have a good UI design and definitely a well delivered content, site speed can help on conversion on technical level, but your brand should be maintained and identifiable to have the best conversion you wish for.
