Page Speed is one of the ranking factors for Google for a couple of years now. After realizing how important it is for enhancing user-friendliness, Google has focused greatly on it and is also encouraging other websites to focus on it by incorporating it into the algorithm. With each year, its importance is increasing for websites and with the looks of it, Page Speed is highly likely to remain a massive indicator of your website’s overall user experience for years to come.
We can easily justify it with the logic that, a website that loads quicker, fulfills the user intent faster by delivering results in a speedy manner. In this article, Edkent Media seo marketing company in Canada has explained everything there is to know about Page Speed and its metrics.
What is Page Speed?
Page Speed can easily be defined as the amount of time it takes by the website to load all the content and for the browser to receive a web server’s first byte. To explain it in less technical terms, it can simply be understood by the time it takes for the browser to receive the information from the server.
The page speed is highly affected by various elements of your website, such as the CSS style, HTML code, JavaScript files, videos, images, and any form of media and so much more effectively affects the speed of your page.
As the type of devices changes, such as depending on whether you are using a desktop or a mobile phone, the page speed will alter. The reason behind this is, as a different kind of technology is used between the two, the experience also changes for the user.
Page Speed Vs Site Speed
It may sound similar but there is a huge difference in what it entails. Page Speed is the individual loading speed of your website pages where on the other hand, site speed is the overall loading speed of your website.
Why Page Speed Matters
Page Speed is an important metric for Google but that’s not the only reason why you must focus on it. Page Speed is important to focus on because it determines the efficiency of your website by offering a better user experience. Based on the recent Kissmetrics Infographic, if a website page is taking more than 3 seconds to load, then over 25% of users will click away from the website and will go to another website. This is what increases your bounce rate.
Similarly, mobile users also expect the website pages to load fasters. The same study showed that 73% of users were dissatisfied with the loading speed of the websites.
You would be surprised to know but page speed significantly enhances your conversion rate. It was reported by Walmart that every second of the increased page speed on their website resulted in a two percent increase in conversion.
Not just this, but when you improve the page speed of your website, it automatically helps you optimize your website for SEO. Google in the last decade included the page speed metric into their ranking factors.
As Google is trying more and more to make the search engine user-friendly, it has incorporated page speed with Core Web Vitals with existing metrics to offer a better experience to users.
Page Speed Metrics
It is important to understand page speed metrics to understand how page speed is measured for websites. Let’s take a lot at the Core Web Vitals to understand how several metrics affect the page speed.
Largest Content Paint (LCP): LCP represents the main content of the page to load completely and it is related to the total load time of the page.
First Input Delay (FIP): The FIP is related to the interactivity of the page and it represents the time from when the user first interacts with your website to when the browser first responds to the interaction appropriately.
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): The CLS shows us the instances when the layout of the page shifts unexpectedly.
Analyzing Page Speed
You can easily analyze the page speed of your website using the various tools available on the internet. Google has introduced a special tool for the same called as Google’s PageSpeed Insights. It lets you analyze the overall and individual page speed of your website.