When people open a website, they want the page to populate as quickly as possible. Think about how frustrating it is when you try to open a website, and it takes forever for the content to appear. If you are like most people, you will probably click right off the page. Google has reported for years that the probability of someone bouncing from your page goes up by 32% as the load time increases from 1 to 3 seconds.
Page speed SEO should take priority for any commerce site.
How important is page speed for SEO?
People might ask, “Does page speed affect SEO?”
Since the time it takes for a website to load impacts people’s behavior, it also impacts SEO. The search engines want people to have a positive experience when making a query. Since people respond negatively to websites that take too long to load, search engines will also give negative marks to these sites. These negatively impact your SEO-relevance and therefore how highly your page appears on the SERPs in response to relevant queries.
If you are interested in page speed SEO strategies for ecommerce sites, let’s look at some of the most important factors you need to know.
Testing your page speed SEO strategies
Since your page speed and SEO go hand-in-hand, Google has also made it easy for you to test your website to see just how fast it loads and where potential problems might occur. PageSpeed Insights can be an excellent place to get started. All you need to do is enter your URL and the report will tell you how long it takes to load your site to various milestones. It will also offer suggestions for what you can do to fix some of the issues and see the biggest gains.
Before you take any steps to improve your page speed SEO, it is helpful to track your current speed so you have a benchmark and can judge the impact of your efforts moving forward.
Improving page speed and SEO
After you have gauged your initial page load speed, you want to take steps that will improve your performance. Shaving even a second off your page load speed can help boost you in front of the competition.
Compress your images to improve SEO page speed
Loading images can be one of the more challenging components for browsers to open, which makes it a key area for you to optimize. With image compression, you reduce the size of the image file without necessarily disrupting the quality of the photo itself. This makes it a quick fix as a part of your eCommerce SEO strategies.
There are a number of tools available online that make it easy for you to compress your images. If you put any video files on your site, you will likely want to follow a similar process and compress the video files, as this will make it easier for the browser to load the page. We personally love to use iLoveIMG.
Along similar lines, you can also use a process known as lazy loading with your page speed SEO strategies for eCommerce sites. With lay loading, you have your image files only load when that part of the screen is visible to the user. Since you can prioritize your design and which images load first, you encourage the web page to load the more important components before the images. Your users can then start interacting with your site earlier. This will boost your page load speed rankings as well.
Audit your plugins
Plugins can help you run a variety of different interesting features on your website. Unfortunately, if you have too much running it can quickly slow down your site load time.
You want to periodically take an inventory of the plugins on your site. See which ones you absolutely still need and which ones can be deactivated or deleted from your site altogether as a part of your eCommerce SEO strategy.
Use browser caching for SEO page speed
Browser caching helps your site load faster because it reduces the number of times your site needs to make requests to external servers. The browser instead ‘remembers’ the site from the last time the user visited and it will load faster on their screen.
Building your business with page speed SEO strategies
Improving your site load speed can help you boost your overall site rankings and build more traffic to your website. Many people ask, “how important is page speed for SEO?” If you have not paid much attention to your site speed in the past, it is time to get started with testing.
If you want to take your site optimization and eCommerce SEO strategies further, let’s chat. Our eCommerce SEO Agency has proven itself to help countless brands reach their goals. For Cutter & Buck, our SEO efforts resulted in a 49% increase in revenue. Want results like that for yourself? Contact us today.
When people open a website, they want the page to populate as quickly as possible. Think about how frustrating it is when you try to open a website, and it takes forever for the content to appear. If you are like most people, you will probably click right off the page. Google has reported for years that the probability of someone bouncing from your page goes up by 32% as the load time increases from 1 to 3 seconds.
Page speed SEO should take priority for any commerce site.
