What does Page Speed mean?

Definition

Page Speed is an important indicator for webmasters. It tells how good the performance or the loading time of a website is.

Page Speed is a recognized ranking factor and counts to the
Technical SEO
.

Causes slow page speed

There are several causes that can slow down your website:

1. Slow database: If a database does not work fast enough, it can negatively affect the page speed. The databases are used for product advertisements, for example.
2. Slow Server: If the responses from the server take too long, it also affects the page speed.
3. Split JavaScript: Without asynchronous JavaScript, a web page cannot be rendered until the script is fully loaded. Thus, it makes the website slower. This can be remedied by merging the JavaScript files.
4. Useless source code: If the client reading the source code has to read redundant source code, the page will also slow down. These can be superfluous characters, for example.
5. Excessive CSS files: These need to be merged so that not too many requests are made to the server.

Page Speed in the Search Console

The Google Page Speed Tool can be found in the Google Search Console. It allows to analyze the speed of a web page. This can be divided into mobile and desktop. Google also gives recommendations on how to improve speed.

Here is another detailed video from Google Webmasters about Page Speed:

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E-commerce and Page Speed

Page speed plays an important role in online commerce. If the load time on a web page is too high, this can have a
Conversion Rate
negatively influence the This means that customers will abandon the purchase if the page takes too long to load.

About a quarter of purchases are abandoned due to loading times of more than ten seconds. Amazon released a study on load times and in it they calculated:

If a web page takes longer than ten seconds to load, this results in a loss of sales of one percent.

In the U.S., nearly 80 percent of all purchases are made on mobile. In this area, the bouncerate is as high as 40 percent.

Here is the link to the study from Amazon:

https://sites.google.com/site/glinden/Home/StanfordDataMining.2006-11-28.ppt?attredirects=0

Optimization possibilities

Page speed can be improved by certain optimization measures:

1. Reduceserverresponse times
2. Remove unnecessary social plugins
3. Using the Content Delivery Network
4. Bundle CSS files (to CSS sprites)
5. Compress web page with gzip
6. Use of asynchronous JavaScript
7. Reduction of http requests
8. Removal of superfluous characters from the source code
9. Compress images

Relevance for SEO

Page speed is an important metric for SEO. Low loading times increase the usability of the website and Google wants to favour these websites.

For a few years now, however, the loading speed of the mobile version has also played a significant role. This is referred to as “mobile friendliness”.

Thus, page speed can be considered as an important OnPage measure for search engine optimization.