This is a video transcribe.

Speed is an important Google ranking factor. If your website loads too slowly, you're likely to have higher bounce rates, which indicates to Google that your website : a) isn't performing particularly well or, b) it isn't satisfying UX (or user experience).

You will find that many of your competitors who are ranking higher than you on Google, may have low quality sites, or lower service reviews, and the reason why they still rank higher is because their websites are loading much faster. So, it's important that you start to take the page speed of your website into account when you're trying to rank higher on Google, to get noticed by more users and get more traffic to your website.

Google are really looking at both the desktop and mobile versions of your website to load in around two seconds. They have their own tool which you can use to check the speed. The link for that is Google Page Speed, but it isn't always regarded as having real world accuracy by SEO experts.

There are some other tools have been developed that can help you. The one that I use the most is GTmetrix. All you need to do is pop your URL into the page search bar and GTmetrix will give you a scorecard, effectively, showing you not only how quickly your site loads, and it will also tell you some of the main loading problems.

3 simple page speed tricks you need to try

We are going to work through three ways that you can reduce page speed by talking about three of the main problems happening on your site.

Website images

First of all, images are a big problem for websites. So, if you have a website that is image heavy, make sure each of your images are compressed the using the smallest amount of memory possible.

That means when they're rendering during the loading time, they aren’t taking too long to load.

There are two things I would do to improve my images.

1. I compress the images that I'm using

2. I would be more selective about the number of images that I'm using on each page of my website

Too much JavaScript

The second common problem is JavaScript.

How many extra widgets have you employed on each page to do extra little things that your website can't do on its own?

These could be share buttons, adverts, pop-ups, etc.

Some of these may be heavy in code and time to render, causing longer page loading. What I would suggest is going through these and checking, which are still appropriate to your website and deleting those that aren't.

I've found myself, that by deleting something it can make a big difference in my page speed score.

For example, I thought was going to be helpful in asking my readers to share my content, at the end of each page with share buttons. However, it was costing me about five seconds of extra load time that I didn't need. So just by removing that widget I reduced my page speed, reduced my bounce rate, and increased my traffic.

Be careful with fonts

The third and final, very common problem is the use of fonts and in particular script fonts.

If you're using something that's outside of the realm of your website provider, you may find that you've had to go and get the files and have them downloaded onto your website in order to use those specific fonts. From a design point of view your site looks very beautiful. The problem is that it is taking longer to render during the first paint (initial page load).

Reducing the number of times that script fonts appear on your website can make a big difference. So, think about where you use them, if at all… maybe use them in your header or titles, and that will vastly reduce your loading problem.

I hope that’s been helpful.

If you've got any questions about page speed or ranking for Google, then drop them in the comments and I'll be along to help you soon.

Thank you, guys.

Sara.

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