A fast website isn’t just a nice-to-have, it’s a crucial part of staying competitive online.
This guide covers everything you need to know to boost your page speed and user satisfaction for improved search visibility.
The high cost of slow websites: Why speed matters
Google’s Core Web Vitals show that website speed and user experience are intertwined.
Users will leave your site if a webpage takes too long to load. That’s nothing new.
Google stated years ago that going from a 1 to 5-second load time will result in 90% of users leaving your site without interacting with it.
So, even if your website ranks high on Google, a slow site will impact your performance.
Why?
As user experience declines, people will exit your site without buying your products, reading your content or interacting with it.
That said, speed goes far beyond just user experience impact. Core Web Vitals makes it clear that speed is an essential factor.
Understanding Core Web Vitals
Core Web Vitals (CWVs) are a set of metrics used to evaluate user experience. They measure the following for both desktop and mobile users:
Loading speed.
Page responsiveness.
Visual stability.
CWVs were introduced in 2020 to provide user-centric, real-world metrics that SEO professionals and site owners can use to measure usability.
Since its release, we’ve seen quite a few updates, the most important being First Input Delay, which Interaction Next Paint replaced. The main elements of CWVs include:
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): Measures the loading performance of a page. LCP accounts for the first 2.5 seconds of a page’s loading.
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): Measures a page’s visual stability.
Interaction to Next Paint (INP): A way to measure visual feedback delay and its impact on user experience.
CWVs work to offer a technical SEO aspect with a focus on page experience and usability.
Which element of CWV is most important?
INP is, supposedly, the most important of all CWVs, and I’ve written an entire guide on Optimizing for INP, the new Core Web Vitals metric.
Understanding page experience
Page experience, which includes Core Web Vitals, is not a direct ranking factor, according to Google.
Google Search Liaison Danny Sullivan clarified on X that while page experience is important, it is not explicitly listed as a ranking factor.
“It doesn’t say it’s a ranking factor. Just like the CWV page doesn’t say that ‘This, along with other. It talks about these things aligning with what we do measure “page experience aspects, aligns with what our core ranking systems seek to reward.’”
Does that mean that page speed is no longer important?
No. Speed is important for websites.
Why?
Search engines aim to offer the best results for search queries.
If a site is slow, isn’t responsive or accessible, and doesn’t perform well on mobile, then it may not be the best result to deliver.
Multiple signals make up page experience, including:
Core Web Vitals.
Mobile-friendliness.
HTTPS.
Non-intrusive interstitials.
Google states:
“While page experience is important, Google still seeks to rank pages with the best information overall, even if the page experience is subpar. Great page experience doesn’t override having great page content. However, in cases where there are many pages that may be similar in relevance, page experience can be much more important for visibility in Search.”
Where page speed fits into page experience and SEO
Google’s statement on page experience shows that if everything else is created equal, page experience may improve visibility in the search results.
While page experience is certainly not the only thing you want to focus on, it’s one more element in your control to improve your site’s visibility on the SERPs.
Page speed is significant because it impacts Core Web Vitals heavily and will improve all three components. To find areas for improvement, run a PageSpeed Insights report.
9-step guide to page speed optimization
If you’re not passing all the scores on CWV, you can follow these steps to optimize your page speed.
1. Minify coding
You can optimize CSS, JavaScript and HTML. Various tools, such as HTMLMinifier, CSSNano and UglifyJS, can help you minify your coding. Minifying means reducing all unnecessary characters.
You can minify CSS, JS and HTML on your own, but using one of the solutions above is much faster and more efficient.
But, after minifying your coding, I recommend:
Reviewing multiple pages on the site.
Checking to see if anything broke along the way.
Sometimes, when you minify your coding, things will break. Once you’re done with minifying, you can remove unused coding.
2. Remove unused coding
If you have unused JavaScript or CSS code, remove them. Every little bit helps to reduce file sizes and speed up your site. You can do this in a few ways, but like with minifying, it’s important to analyze your site after removing unused coding.
Google PageSpeed Insights will show you unused coding on your site:
You’ll also see unused JavaScript that you can remove, but you need to work with a developer or know what elements may be used on other pages on the site.
Certain WordPress plugins can help you if you’re using the CMS, including:
WP Rocket.
Debloat.
Many other caching solutions.
3. Caching
Installing caching on the application level can help.
WordPress and most other CMS options have caching plugins that reduce the load on your site’s database and can dramatically improve CWVs.