As it is clear from our day-to-day experience, in modern internet environment there is virtually no patience. Whenever someone clicks a website’s link, he expects it to be loaded in a couple of seconds. Otherwise, visitors will definitely switch to an alternative page because they have other things to worry about. Google was aware of this tendency and introduced a page speed criterion as an integral part of its ranking algorithm. Thus, if your platform is working slowly, you cannot afford to rank higher in Google search engine result pages (SERPs). As far as US market is concerned, you need to ensure your website is as fast as possible to be successful.
As you know, the term ‘website speed’ includes a range of aspects like server capacity, coding optimization and asset management. To better comprehend the concept, we need to mention some specific metrics used by Google. These criteria were called Core Web Vitals by developers who measure loading speed, interaction and visual stability of a page from the user’s perspective. If your website does not satisfy these criteria, your competitors who have faster pages may beat you despite of high-quality content. Knowing how website speed affects your SEO ranking position becomes extremely useful in the course of website optimization.
Why Page Speed Matters for Google and the US Market
Google cares only about its users. That’s why the company wants to serve them the best products by providing high-quality websites and relevant services. In the United States, the country possessing the most developed infrastructure, users have a very high tolerance level for page speed. Consequently, a website loaded slowly is bound to attract visitors for just a few seconds, making it hard for Google to justify its position of the best search engine. On the other hand, if your site is working quickly, people will stay on it longer and use its services actively.
Besides, website speed affects your site’s crawling budget significantly. Crawling budget is the term that refers to the amount of time Googlebot spends visiting and indexing your site. If your server is responding slow or your pages take time to load, there will be fewer indexed pages. That means new content of yours may take much time to get into Google database and become available on SERPs.
Deconstructing Google Core Web Vitals
To make it easier for you to optimize your site in accordance with Google standards, let us break down these metrics for you. Let’s remember what Google Core Web Vitals are. They belong to Google “Page Experience” signal and include three separate metrics – Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), Interaction to Next Paint (INP), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS). The LCP is measuring perceived loading speed and is telling us when your main page content gets loaded. The best option for LCP is when the website can display the whole content in 2.5 seconds after being opened.
The second metric called Interaction to Next Paint (INP) used to be named First Input Delay (FID). Now it measures the responsiveness of a webpage towards user interaction throughout the entire session. INP will be great if you can display a response to each visitor’s action instantly. Finally, Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) represents visual stability and counts layout changes experienced by visitors in the process of loading a webpage. You should ensure your text and pictures do not jump around the screen.
Choosing a High-Performance Hosting Infrastructure
Any lightning-fast website needs a high-performance hosting infrastructure behind. There are lots of cheap solutions available on the web, but using them is not recommended if you want to have a high-performance platform. With the shared hosting solution, you have little control over the speed of your server and have no opportunity to increase CPU, RAM, or bandwidth of your server. So it will work equally well if you buy a cheap plan from $1-$2 per month. Choose a managed WordPress hosting, virtual private server (VPS), or cloud hosting solution instead.
When choosing your hosting service, you should take into consideration geographic proximity of servers to the majority of your target visitors. Since your target market might include customers who are living in the continental part of the United States, try to choose servers that are located in the same area or even country. It’s preferable to choose modern technologies like LiteSpeed/Nginx servers, having server-side caching and running the latest PHP version.
Implementing an Advanced Caching Strategy
There are several approaches to acceleration of a website, but one of the best practices is to apply caching. It will help you speed up the process of content loading and deliver it to your website faster. Without caching, visitors are asking their browsers to load your website. After getting your page’s link, the browser has to request your server to generate HTML content. Using caching, you will make a pre-generated HTML file saved for every visitor, thus avoiding unnecessary server actions and time consumption.
A good caching strategy should involve at least three types of cache. Page cache helps you save pre-generated HTML content of a webpage. Object caching helps you keep the results of your DB queries and decrease the number of calls made to DB. The browser caching tells the client’s browser to store static assets of your webpage on its HDD. It will save time and traffic as your users won’t be downloading them again when moving from one page to another on your website.
Image Optimization and Next-Gen Formatting
Images usually occupy the largest amount of total size of your web page. Thus, poor images are the leading cause of low scores in LCP. Website owners often upload large images from camera or stock photos to their websites not realizing their negative impact on site speed. It’s recommended to reduce the size of images and optimize them using next-gen formats. Start with reducing their pixel size so they would correspond to their dimensions on the screen.
Apart from this procedure, you should convert images into next-generation formats, which include WebP and AVIF. They give higher compression rate than conventional JPEG/PNG. The last stage of images optimization is implementing lazy loading. Images below the fold shouldn’t be displayed till a user scrolls down to them. It will minimize loading times significantly letting your critical above-the-fold content load faster.
Minifying and Combining Core Code Assets
Each time you install a plugin or theme, a new group of assets will be installed automatically together with these items. They create dozens of HTTP requests and take too much of time to download and interpret by browsers. To reduce them, you should optimize your code. Minification means deleting all extra spaces, line breaks, comments, etc. without changing the functionality of a particular code asset. Minifying will reduce the overall file size of your CSS files and JavaScript files.
If you are using lots of CSS or JavaScript files on your site, you should consider merging them in one file. Merging is a very popular technique helping to reduce HTTP requests and boost loading times. If you do so, be careful not to break your website as JavaScript minification and combining require special attention. Deferred and async attributes help you to execute code in the end when all critical visual styling content is already ready.
Utilizing Content Delivery Networks (CDNs)
Even if you choose the best hosting plan, you still may be limited by server’s location. As a result, users from other regions will face slower response times when visiting a site. The solution to this problem is the Content Delivery Network (CDN). It will help you solve the problem by keeping copies of your web pages’ static assets across a network of globally distributed edge servers. Whenever someone opens your webpage, CDN will detect his/her location and serve him/her a copy stored on the nearest server.
It greatly reduces latency and server response time, offloading your server. Besides, using CDNs gives you additional benefits in terms of protection from hackers. You should choose a reliable CDN supplier that would guarantee high scalability of his network and protection of your website. Nowadays, CDN has become an essential component of any website trying to dominate competitive rankings in Google SERPs.
Database Maintenance and Housekeeping
All dynamically generated pages depend on your website’s database. Whenever you add a post or make configuration changes, new data gets saved in the database. Eventually, it fills it up with redundant data, slowing your database and delaying server response time. You should clean your database regularly and remove all redundant objects from it.
By cleaning database, you make sure your queries remain quick and your database works smoothly. It will lead to quicker server response time and better loading speeds. To accomplish this task, there are a variety of methods you can use, including database maintenance plugins or performing optimization tasks in your hosting account’s cPanel interface.
Eliminating Unnecessary Extensions and Plugins
Modern website platforms allow us installing plugins to enhance websites and provide visitors with some unique features. Unfortunately, we tend to install as many of them as it’s necessary without thinking if we really need them. As soon as you install a plugin, you introduce new code and scripts into your platform. All of them may affect loading speed, adding extra HTTP requests and delaying responses.
To ensure a great performance of your website, you should audit it regularly and clean up all redundant plugins. If you are using some feature on your website, but don’t need it anymore, uninstall the extension and remove it from your website. Try to replace some heavy plugins with others that consume less resources and have better performance. In some cases, you may combine several tools in one optimization plugin.
Mobile Optimization and Responsive Performance
With mobile traffic accounting for the larger percentage of all traffic in the United States, mobile optimization becomes crucial. Google follows the policy of mobile-first indexing that means it is the mobile version of your website that affects your ranking. It doesn’t matter how beautiful your website looks on a powerful PC if it behaves badly on a smartphone. Thus, mobile-friendly websites become a norm now, and you have to make your platform performant on mobile devices.
There are some techniques that may help you. Firstly, you should optimize your website and remove bulky images. Also, mobile phones tend to operate much slower and have worse connections. Secondly, you should ensure your webpage is responsive enough and can adapt itself to any screen size of smartphones. Besides, touch controls must be functional and smooth on any phone screen.
AdSense Compatibility and Balancing Monetization
Using Google AdSense in your business, you should care about the page speed as this issue affects your ads’ performance. Ad networks use special JavaScript code to display ads to your users. In case this code is poorly inserted into a webpage, it may delay your LCP or cause Cumulative Layout Shift. Fortunately, there are ways to overcome this obstacle and make your monetization strategy performant enough for AdSense network.
The first recommendation is to insert ads into pages asynchronously. This way you’ll allow your page to load without waiting for ads’ response. The other trick is setting up specific dimensions of your ad container. It will ensure your browser has enough space to accommodate your ad before the loading starts, and there will be no visual shifts afterwards.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
How does website speed directly impact my Google AdSense earnings?
The answer to this question is quite simple. The more your site performs, the more visitors can stay on your website. More traffic means more opportunities to show ads and earn money. In other words, your page speed influences AdSense revenues indirectly affecting user engagement rates.
What is a realistic target score for Google PageSpeed Insights?
Getting 100/100 score on this website is always nice. Nevertheless, it’s more important to pass Google Core Web Vitals test. So, to get a high score, you should pay close attention to your Largest Contentful Paint, ensuring it is no more than 2.5 seconds and all other metrics fall into the Google “Good” range for both desktop and mobile experience.
Can using too many fonts slow down my website performance?
Using many fonts slows down your website’s loading process because you have to load them all from remote servers every time a user requests your site. In other words, you make additional HTTP requests that slow your website down considerably. So it’s recommended to use as few fonts as possible.
Is a premium cache plugin absolutely necessary for a fast website?
There are many free plugins that are working just fine and give users a possibility to create caches. Premium plugins provide better functionality, but their paid status doesn’t mean they work better than free tools. Apart from this, server-side caching gives you an extra advantage when it comes to performance.
