How To Improve Page Speed Score To Boost SEO And Conversions
Google emphasized the importance of fast page load speed. But does it affect SEO? How about conversions? The simple answer to these questions is yes. Proper maintenance on your website can boost SEO and conversions.
Before you can boost your page speed score, you need to know how fast your site loads. One of the ways to know it is to use Google PageSpeed Insights. It measures your site’s performance for mobile and desktop devices. Although it’s vital to achieve a 100 percent score, you don’t have to focus on your effort to reach it. That’s because the score depends on a variety of factors.
Below, you will find some ways to improve your page speed for your SEO efforts and conversions. In April 2010, Google announced that the speed of a page is critical and it is used as a ranking factor.
Eliminate JavaScript and CSS
You must delete render-blocking JavaScript and CSS from the above the fold content. When a browser renders a page, it needs to parse the HTML backup.
Each time it encounters a script, it needs to stop before IT continues parsing the HTML. That said, make sure to avoid or minimize the use of render-blocking JavaScript that must be obtained before executing it.
Optimize photos
PageSpeed Insights find images as a common issue. Thus, it’s vital that you optimize your images to improve your page’s performance.
You can achieve it by compressing your images before uploading them to your server. There are tons of third-party tools that can do this job. But make sure that you use a compression tool that doesn’t compromise the quality of your images.
Lower server response time
It’s a crucial part of improving page speed score. Before you can do so, you must understand what causes the slow down on your server response time. Could it be memory starvation or CPU starvation? How about libraries? Slow routing?
You need to look into these factors to know the issues that can impact your site so that you can work on fixing the problems.
Use browser caching
Unfortunately, fetching site’s resources over the network can be slow. That’s why Google encouraged websites to use browser caching.
But make sure that you specify your caching policy on your website. The Internet search giant recommends having a cache of one week up to a year for static assets.
If you need assistance on your website maintenance and SEO strategy, please call SEO Expert Danny at (213) 322-0770.