What is site speed?
In general, page loading speed is a term that indicates how long it takes users to load a page and become ready to interact. The page load time obtained from a sample of page views on a site is called site speed.
The opening speed of the site has two different importance in terms of SEO. The first is that it is a ranking factor for Google. Google announced in 2018 that site speed will be a ranking factor. This means that sites with better site speed will rank higher than other sites in a situation where everything else is the same.
Another important point about site speed is related to user experience. Waiting for the content on a site to load is equally annoying for users, just as it is annoying when a meal you ordered comes home late, you spend time waiting in traffic, a bus you have been waiting for does not come for a long time, or you have to wait in line to get on the metrobus.
If your site is not fast enough, users will interact less with your site. In addition, many users will leave your site without even waiting for the landing page to load. Research shows that as the loading time of a web page increases, there is an increase in the number of users who bounce on that page.
What should we pay attention to to increase site speed?
1. Avoid Unnecessary Code Piles
Many different code sequences run in the background to create the user-visible side of your site. Even if ready-made software is used or service is provided with a specially prepared system, certain codes must run in the background in any case.
The fact that these codes are prepared as simply as possible and there are no unnecessary code stacks will increase your site speed. Even if you are using popular ready-made systems such as WordPress, you need to get rid of these unnecessary code stacks by checking your plugins and theme.
2. Don’t Make Wrong and Wrong Coding
The perfect technical infrastructure of your site will have a serious effect on page opening speed. In order for your pages to open faster, you need to fix the missing or incorrectly prepared code indexes.
Errors in technical coding do not only affect your page loading speed. According to the SEO standards determined by Google, errors on websites are considered as a factor in rankings. If your site has many faulty code snippets, both your rankings will be negatively affected and your site speed will decrease.
3. Eliminate Non-Optimized Pages
Optimizing and reducing the size of all pages on your website will speed up your site. It is possible to compress and optimize all pages, no matter what language they are encoded in.
In particular, you can create noticeable changes in your speed by delivering static pages to your user from a cache. Likewise, if you use proper caching on your site, you can also lighten the load on your server.
4. Do Not Use Uncompressed Media Items
Visual media that is not properly optimized is one of the factors that affect your site speed. If you optimize the images on your site appropriately, it is possible to reduce their size by almost half.
Compressing your media will both reduce the load on the server and allow your users to load the page much faster. Do not forget to make the appropriate settings so that your images do not lose quality during optimization.
Optimizing images by compression is also a ranking factor in Google’s eyes. With this work, you can both speed up your site and get more traffic by ensuring that the media of your site is in high rankings in Google Images.
5. Prefer High Speed Servers
İnternet sitenizin kullanıcıya ulaştırılmasından sorumlu olan sunucunuzun, hosting hizmetinizin yavaş olması, site trafiğinizi kaldıramıyor olması site hızınızı doğrudan etkileyecektir. Her zaman için kaliteli bir hosting hizmeti aldığınızdan emin olmalısınız.
Sunucu performansınızı geliştirmek ve sitenizi daha hızlı hale getirmek için server tarafında da çeşitli optimizasyon çalışmaları yapmak mümkün. Site genelinde önbellekleme kullanarak daha yüksek bir performans elde edebilmek mümkün.
6. Use CDN
The use of CDN enables the visitors to load images and static pages of websites from another server, from closer distances according to their geographical location. CDN services, which cause changes on a millisecond basis, can provide an advantage to your SEO work as they will enable Google bots to reach the content much faster.
After performing all the checks on your site and making the necessary corrections, you can take your performance one step further by using CDN.