Date: 02/July/2024

Introduction

Regardless of your business size or structure, the speed of your company website is a critical factor in improving its SEO.
A fast website is essential for a business to appear on the first page of Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs). The company website also needs to be fast on mobile and desktop. A slow website not only hampers your chances of being ranked on page 1 but also leads to a high bounce rate, potentially resulting in customer loss.

Here’s what can happen if your company website is slow:

-Google will not rank it as high
– Your companies bounce rate may well be very high
– You could be missing out on sales
– The time of site on Google Analytics could be slow
– The average number of pages the shopper goes on could be less
– Your business could be disadvantaged, as Google’s algorithm may rank your business much lower in Google’s SERPs.

Purchase good quality website hosting.

In today’s digital landscape, websites need to be supersonic—think Concord speed. Achieving this requires a significant investment in high-quality hosting and reliable hosting providers—don’t just opt for the cheapest hosting prices, as this could damage your business’s search engine optimisation.

This article will explain fully how you can improve your business page speed:

What is Google’s recommended page load time?

Many SEO consultants and leading web design agencies agree that Google (Alphabet Inc) hasn’t stipulated an exact page load time for which to aim. However, Google and other large search engine companies, such as Microsoft’s Bing, have clarified that they want company websites to be as fast as possible.

Google, for example, has provided “Google’s Page Speed Insights,” a perfect tool for assessing the speed of your company website and recommending ways to improve it.

Therefore, especially on larger e-commerce websites, web developers spend thousands of hours improving the website’s speed and lowering bounce rate to enable a better user experience; therefore, it’s all about having a fast website, and slow hosting or a slow website has no place in 2024.

If your business is serious about getting on page one of Google.co.uk or Google.com, you need fast hosting. Businesses also sometimes have an AMP (Accelerated Mobile Version) of the website designed.

Don’t opt for super cheap/low-cost hosting. It’s often a false economy.

Sure, there are also hosting companies that offer super low prices for low-cost monthly website hosting, yet if the website is so slow that it puts you at a direct disadvantage behind your direct competitors, then it’s a false economy.

Therefore, as a small business owner, investing in supersonic website hosting is well worth the extra expense. It’s also a good move, as it could help improve your company’s SEO. While it may be triple the price or more, the benefits to your SEO and user experience (U.X) are invaluable.

Some things can’t be improved.

Let’s say somebody is in the middle of a field at a rock concert, and the signal on their smartphone is not that good. The website owner cannot control how fast, say, the 4G network is in that particular area.

The business can control the design of the website to ensure it loads quickly, so you may want an AMP version of your website. Take the example of a content management system, which can sometimes be bloated with unnecessary plug-ins. These can be identified and removed, improving the load time, and a web developer can exercise this control to improve the speed of your company website.

Remove unnecessary WordPress plugins (get your web designers to do this, as it could affect how your website works)

These could be unnecessary WordPress CMS plugins, which, when present and not being used, could slow down the load time of every page. However, these are issues that a skilled web developer can address and improve upon.

Therefore, the key to good website design is not just aesthetics but also speed—this is why we recommend using Google Page Speed Insights to see how you can improve the speed of your company website. It’s about finding the balance to ensure your website is visually appealing, has a good design, and is supersonic fast.

Many SEO agencies and web designers fully understand that Google Page Experience is now essential to the web design process. Therefore, the website must visually stabilise quickly, be mobile-friendly, and have a rapid page load speed. If not, the website should be improved; yes, this can take hundreds of hours of a web developer’s time, which is sometimes vital if your business wants to improve its organic SEO.

While many web developers can help your website do this, it should only be undertaken by highly qualified and experienced web developers.

Compressing images

Let’s say you have a website; there are ten images on each page, say on the homepage of your WordPress website.
The homepage could take a long time to load, which could seriously disadvantage your organic SEO if your website is now slow because of the large pictures you have included on it.

Let’s say you run a holiday cottage somewhere rural in the middle of France. You might have thought you were doing an excellent job by adding all those pictures to show potential tourists what the place and the surrounding countryside look like. You’re happy because you designed the WordPress website yourself, and you may think you have done an excellent job.

But at the same time, if the website is too slow to load because of too many large images of your holiday cottage in France, another competitor with another holiday cottage with a more basic website may rank higher on Google.fr. So, you would work with a web designer from the start to make that website faster. The web developers will most likely use Google Page Speed Insights to make the website faster.

HTTP Caching

This can mean that if a shopper returns to your website, for example, somebody might browse around and buy or visit, say, ten different online retailers of washing machines from various online retailers. But let’s say that your company website has had “Browser HTTP Caching enabled”; this will likely make your company website much faster if the shopper returns to your website, offering a better user experience.

Most definitely use Google’s PageSpeed Insights.

You should definitely use Google’s PageSpeed Insights; it’s free and can help improve your website’s performance. It even gives a list of recommendations to help optimise your website. Therefore, most web designers and SEO agencies use this tool to improve the page’s loading speed.

So, what does a web developer mean when they’re talking about page speed?

It simply refers to how long a blog post or page takes to load in your browser. Therefore, it’s widely considered that the faster, the better, as it offers a better user experience, which can help reduce bounce rates.

How can this help to improve the business’s marketing?

In the early days of Google’s algorithm, when they used Google PageRank, Google’s algorithm didn’t consider how fast the website was—so it was not a ranking factor.

In 2024, most SEO agencies and web design companies would agree that Google’s algorithms are using the speed of your company website as a ranking factor.

This means Google is working out how fast your company website is and using this information in its calculations to determine where to rank your company in the SERPS. Therefore, you need fast and good-quality website hosting.

Do you need a new website designed?

When we design a brand-new website for a business in Cardiff, South Wales, we carefully contemplate the user experience—in terms of how to design the WordPress website to offer a good U.X. So, whether it loads on an Android Smartphone or an Apple iOS, it loads quickly.

Therefore, if you’re looking for a well-designed website built in Cardiff, we are most definitely the web developers to talk to.