Does Page Speed Affect SEO
You might be asking yourself, does page speed affect SEO, and the short answer is yes. Google is more likely to show your site in search results if it is fast. If it’s slow, Google doesn’t want to show it and the users don’t want to stay on your page.
What Is Page Speed
Page speed refers to how fast your website will load for the user. Larger files like large photos require a longer load time, among other things. Google suggests a load speed of 2-3 seconds.
Studies have shown that conversions and leads increase as websites get faster. So if you want more roofing leads and you want your site to show up in Google, you need to increase the speed of your website.
How Does Page Speed Affect SEO
The speed of your website and SEO are related to each other because search engines want to show the best websites. If your website has the greatest information but poor speed, you have an SEO problem because Google doesn’t want to show it in results.
What users do on your site also affects your search results. So if a user has to wait too long for your site to load, they will most likely leave the site in search of another roofer. Google notices this behavior.
How To Check Your Website Speed
Thankfully Google provides a free tool called PageSpeed Insights that will tell you how fast your website is loading and what you need to do to improve the loading speed. Once you’re on the free tool, type in your website URL and wait a minute for the results to come.
There will be two sets of results for your website, one for mobile and the other for desktop. Both are important. Don’t be surprised if one is faster than the other. But keep in mind that most likely half of your customers are searching for you on their mobile device, so that one is really important.
Your roofing website will be rated between 1 and 100. An ideal number would be somewhere between 90-100. Of course that will take a lot of work. The lower the number, the worse off your website is. But while that might be ideal, if you’re in the 70s to 80s, that's really good as well.
Under the rating section you will see an area that lists off all the things that you can do to fix your site. It will show you what aspects are slowing down your site and which ones to prioritize.
How To Fix Your Website Speed For SEO
Once you’ve run the test as mentioned above, and gathered the list of items. Take this to your web developer or whoever is managing your website. If you have someone doing SEO, Search Engine Optimization on your site, they can help you with these things.
Some of the items on the list will be technical and others a bit more simple. For example, changing the photo sizes might be easier to handle then adjusting aspects to the coding on the site. So perhaps you’ll be able to address some of them right away.
You can change the size of your photos by downloading them off your site, changing the size of the photo and then uploading them back to your page. You can use this free tool called TinyPNG to compress your photos.
Roofing Websites And Page Speed
Keep in mind that one of the items that can slow down your site are the third party plugins like shingle color sample tools that shingle manufacturers provide. That’s not to say you should avoid them, just take into consideration the speed of a page when using these features.
Another thing to look out for is the pictures. As mentioned above, you can compress the photos so they load quicker. This will be helpful because photos are an important part of showcasing your work to your potential customers.
So in answer to the question of does page speed affect SEO, I hope you’ve found this helpful. Keep in mind that there are other components to your website that will help customers find you on search engines and help them convert when they land on your website.
For more information, check out our page on Roofer SEO.