If you’ve reassessed your company website lately, you were likely taking a careful look at your page’s visual design and general accessibility. The more elusive consideration, however, is page speed, and the purpose of this article is to inform you why the page speed of your site is more important than ever for SEO.
Everyone likes a fast and responsive website. And there’s no doubt that Google has duly taken note of this. In recent years, Google produced a set of tools for web developers to help them optimize loading speed called, Google Light House. It’s, therefore, necessary to recognize that, because page speed is so important to web users, Google now considers your site’s loading time as a key ranking factor while supplying a means of tracking it with its PageSpeed Insights tool.
Previously a bit of an afterthought among developers, Google just implemented several important updates to PageSpeed Insights. To begin with, the tool now features an accurate metric for uploading speed, which can be measured in Google’s Core Web Vitals report. According to Google, this report is a means of gauging user experience, with upload time representing a critical factor in assessing that experience. While the PageSpeed tool was recently enhanced for better performance, some users confirm that it’s somewhat more difficult to understand.
PageSpeed Insights is powered by Google Light House, and if you’re familiar with Light House, apprehending how to use PageSpeed becomes significantly more clear. PageSpeed is what webmasters and developers use to identify an array of performance issues on their sites; and, in particular, performance issues that can impact not only the website’s SEO rankings in Google but your customer’s user overall experience.
Upon conducting its analysis of how your website is loading, Google’s PageSpeed will issue two scores -one for the desktop and another score for the mobile version. In the past, PageSpeed only assessed the desktop version of your page. But with more than 50% of searches being executed on mobile devices, Google prioritized the mobile score, examining the mobile page first, in its “mobile-first index.”
Contentful recently announced that “big changes are coming in May 2021 to the way Google ranks websites in its search results — and it all has to do with something called Core Web Vitals.” While this might be entirely factual, with over 200 ranking determinants, there’s no precise way to know how much improving your Core Web Vitals score will impact your SEO. But that’s not to say that you should neglect PageSpeed altogether. It’s a great way to track how Google interprets your company’s link.
The fundamental takeaway here is that Google is now using data such as loading speed and visual stability to determine how your page ranks in its searches. With that in mind, it’s important to remember that you can now use tools such as Google Lighthouse and PageSpeed to improve your site’s performance and, thusly, increase its general search rankings.
