There are a few things that Google requires of your website. These are what you could consider penalties because if they are not addressed you get put at the bottom of the search results with the rest of the websites that didn’t take care of the “basics”. These website basics are speed, security and basic keyword optimization / proper organization of content.
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In this blog post, we are going to talk about website speed.
The first reason why Google wants you to have a fast website is pretty obvious, firstly if your website is too slow when Google sends someone to it they are much more likely to leave. Remember, everyone’s attention span on the internet is dropping quickly. You want to make a good first impression, and you don’t want to waste people’s time.
The second reason Google penalizes slow websites is because of mobile.
The difference between a 3-second load speed vs a 2-second load time on a desktop doesn’t seem significant, but that same load speed difference can be much more apparent for a mobile device, especially ones with bad coverage/connection. A 3-second load speed on a desktop could be 6-15 seconds on a mobile device, and a 2-second load speed could be 4-10 seconds on a mobile device.
Use a website speed test tool like these to see how fast/slow your website is:
- https://gtmetrix.com/
- https://tools.pingdom.com/
I prefer gtmetrix, but will often also scan with pingdom tools after the first round of speed optimizations as a second opinion to avoid false positives.
You can also use Google’s tools, but I have found those to have more false positives than either gtmetrix or pingdom tools:
- https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
- https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/feature/testmysite
How do you optimize your website speed?
That question completely depends on your hosting plan/setup, what CMS you are using (WordPress, Drupal, etc), and what themes and plugins you are using.
If you are using WordPress the best and easiest solution is the plugin WP Rocket.
