We hop onto our browser and type in our website’s address. It takes a few seconds to load. It seems pretty fast, right? What do search engines consider as an optimal website speed and why does it matter?
How Fast is my Website?
Our website’s loading speed depends on several factors and, in turn, affects a number of things that can help or hinder our position in the search engines. The best way of determining how fast Google deems our site to be is to head to the search engine itself. You can measure your site’s speed with Google’s Pagespeed Insights; a free service that Google provides.
Why Having a Good Site speed is Important?
Having a fast-loading website will propel it in the search engine rankings. Google wants its users to be happy and its users are our audience. Therefore, when our audience arrives on our website and the content takes too long to load, it can make their experience less than optimal, thus hindering our position in Google’s eyes.
How Can I Improve Site Load Speed?
Improving our website’s speed is all about the mechanics. If we can set everything up correctly, there will be no problem in achieving a fast site speed. Let’s look at what actions we can take for a blazing fast website.
1. SSD Hosting with Siteground
It all starts with our web hosting. Where we store our website content and how fast the host is at serving the said content to our visitors is paramount to achieving a fast site speed. Siteground is a hosting provider that focuses on technology and their SSD drives offer a 1000-fold increase in input/output operations over regular drives. In short, using Siteground allows us to have the fastest hosting, allowing us to focus on the other items on our speed list.
2. Optimise Website Load Speed with SG Optimiser from Siteground
Not only does Siteground take care of our hosting but they offer a WordPress plugin that goes one step further. SG Optimiser is a plugin that can be installed in WordPress and further improve how our website functions in conjunction with their hosting.
3. Content Display Network with Cloudflare
Now that we’ve accounted for how our website is set up, it’s time to look at how fast our website’s content can get to our visitors.
A CDN is a group of servers that are distributed around the world to offer the fastest possible delivery of web content. It’s much faster to have content dispersed throughout the globe so that it is ready to load for nearby users. On the contrary, sending the content from a single location can seriously slow down the loading time, making up for a less than optimal user experience.
Cloudflare provides this ability by reducing hosting bandwidth, preventing interruptions in service, and improving security. It’s a great choice if we want to improve on the traditional web hosting and give our website an edge.
