Site Speed Test
If you own a website, you need to think about all the factors that make it better for your audience. Yes, not only do you want to provide information to your readers, but you want to provide true value and offer a great experience.
While true, many site owners will spend a lot of money on the graphics, which is great. However, it can cost you in other ways.
Yes, a slow site will hurt your SEO results, so you need to perform regular site speed tests to keep on top of your site’s performance.
Here are four ways website speed impacts your search ranking:
Google Directly Measures
First and foremost, right off the bat, Google measures your site speed. Simply put, if the site and pages load quickly, you are not going to have any issues with your SEO rankings in that regards.
On the other hand, if pages load slowly and people have trouble opening them, Google will notice and rank your pages accordingly.
While this may not seem fair, it’s one measurement that Google looks at, and you need to take the time to do a site speed test and ensure that it is up to par. That way, you can keep up with your competition.
Bounce Rate
Now, if you own a site, you probably know the term bounce rate. The idea is, if a person leaves your site after only visiting the initial page they landed on, this is called a bounce.
If it is high, Google will take notice as the leading search giant may think your site is spam or of low quality.
Now, you may be wondering why this is relevant to site speed. Well, simply put, if pages load slowly, frustrated users will leave in droves, and it will hurt the bounce rate drastically.
Wider Audience
If you have a wider audience, you are going to have more success and you will bring in more clients. Think about your visitors who come to your site on a smartphone or tablet.
Remember, with a wider audience, you will get better SEO rankings, since you will have a site that will load easily and quickly for users with slow connections and smartphones.
This is something to consider if you want to grow your site and find more clients.
Pages Indexed
Finally, if you know anything about websites and speed, you are going to want to make serious changes. Without a doubt, when you have pages indexed quickly, you are going to see your SEO rankings go up quickly. Not only that, you will rank highly for new keywords, especially long-tail keywords.
So, remember, if you want to do well and gain traction, you will want a fast site, as Google and the leading search engines will index your content quickly. In the end, this is often overlooked by many site owners who don’t understand how things truly work.
Your Hosting Company May Be the Culprit
A lot of the time, most of the problem lies with the company you have your web hosting with. So many Bloggers have no idea that their sites are loading at a snail’s pace-and it’s likely that their sites are experiencing severe down-time on a regular basis as well.
GoDaddy
One web hosting company that stands out as caring about its customers is GoDaddy-and they are certainly concerned about page loading speed.
In the latter part of 2014, the executives at GoDaddy went all-out to crank up their web hosting performance and They appointed Dave Koopman, their principal engineer, to lead the performance team. They even commissioned “Cloud Spectator”, a cloud IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) performance analysis agency, to get an unbiased perspective of their hosting from a third-party.
After going on this crusade to improve site performance, GoDaddy published the results of their efforts in an article that scrutinized GoDaddy’s hosting performance for the month of August 2014. You just don’t see this kind of transparency from most hosts out there.
What’s more is, GoDaddy often have killer specials that make it a no-brainer for site owners to abandon their current poor performance hosting providers.
HostAwesome
HostAwesome
This relatively new hosting company stands out from its competitors because its outstanding features, like Cloudlinux Technology, integrated CDNs in all their plans, litespeed servers, Pure SSD caching and very affordable pricing.
ALL these components serve to dramatically enhance the speed and performance of their clients’ websites and you can read more about exactly how HostAwesome accomplishes this here.
Don’t worry-you’re not alone if you’re concerned that your slow-loading website may be costing you your hard-earned profits. Find out how the owner of this site solved this very problem by switching to HostAwesome after doing a site speed test that gave him quite a shock!
Conclusion
If you own and run a site, you will have an easier time ranking it well if you have fast loading pages that come up with zero errors. Since this is often overlooked, you are going to have an easier time passing up your competition who may not know this trick.
Furthermore, if you have a smart approach to site speed, you are going to do better with other methods as you are going to convert more users who are excited to use your site easily and quickly.
Well, did you do your site speed test? How fast is your site loading?
Are you in total shock? What are you going to do about it?
Let us know in the comments section below and please don’t forget to share this with your network so your business buddies and fellow bloggers can take advantage of this info. 🙂
Of course, you can leave fixing your site-loading speed problems to the professionals. 360 Online Marketing is an internet marketing firm in Boulder, CO specializing in PPC advertising, SEO and web design. Visit their site here: www.360onlinemarketing.com
Featured Image:
Site Speed Test
Image courtesy of David Castillo Dominici at FreeDigitalPhotos.net
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