SEOatSea

Search Marketing Services

Quick Tip:

“Load times affect everything from a user’s desire to remain on the website, to search engines deciding if they should crawl all of your site, and even how rankings as prioritized.  Having a well optimized and quick website is truly one of the best ‘tactics’ to use if you want to get an edge on your competition.”

TalkToRay.com - Page Speed Insights

Your Page Speed Scores

The report card below highlights key independent speed tests results. Each provides an unique perspective and area of focus to consider when evaluating your web page load times.  As with most issues related to website performance, this is just the ‘tip-of-the-iceberg’ but should provide a solid foundation to work from.

Page speed is critical to the usability and ranking ability of your website and we highly encourage you to try and maximize the scores below.

Pingdom.com Performance Grade 62%
GTmetrix.com Performance Grade 50%
Google Page Speed Insights Grade - Mobile 34%
Google Page Speed Insights: Desktop 43%

Quick To-Do's

  1. Optimize Images
  2. Leverage Browser Caching
  3. Enable Server Compression
  4. Eliminate render-blocking  java and css

Your Auditors Comments:

A slow website will discourage users from staying on your site as well as recommending it to others. With a little hard work, most speed issues can be resolved and performance increased in a search ranking impacting manner.

What is Page Speed?

Page speed is a score given to the timing it takes for a website to fully resolve end content to the user.  The faster and more responsive your website is, the more user-friendly and search engine friendly it will become. This will directly translate into ‘trust’ and ‘ranking ability’.  As such, optimizing your page speed is critical to the long-term success of your site.

There is a host of different tools and measurements used to rank the hundreds of factors that go into creating a web page speed score.  This report will highlight some of the most commonly used and provide insight into how to begin implementation of suggested changes.

Why is Page Speed Important?

SEO Best Practices. Google has indicated site speed (and as a result, page speed) is one of the signals used by its algorithm to rank pages. … Page speed is also important to user experience. Pages with a longer load time tend to have higher bounce rates and lower average time on page. Page Speed – SEO Best Practices | Moz

Often, websites with faster load times will be presented above others in almost all search results.  A slow site will absolutely ruin your rankings and user experience.

Where Can I Learn More About Page Speed?

Page speed is one of the most discussed optimization issues available on the internet and there is plenty of information to parse through.  We’ve compiled what we believe to be the best go-to resources for your page speed research.

How Loading Time Affects Your Bottom Line

Speed Is A Killer – Why Decreasing Page Load Time Can Drastically Increase Conversions

Moz.com Page Speed Guide

Why Does Page Speed Impact Your SEO?

You might also enjoy the following video from   Bluehost

Page Speed Findings

Pingdom.com Page Speed Results

The screenshot below shows your most recent Performance Grade courtesy of pingdoom.com.   Their free online tool does a great job crawling and timing your website content. As you can see, there are concerns that should be addressed.


GTmetrix.com Page Speed Results

The GTmetrics page test is run from a different server location and using different bots.  While much of the core factors are the same or similar, having additional insight from other sources validates the results of each score found on other sites.  It also showcases weaknesses in your server response that other tools may not have found.


Google Page Speed: Mobile

Response times for mobile devices (including tablets) can be drastically different than it is for desktop browsers.  Often, there are coding techniques that can be employed to prevent certain content from loading on smaller devices, and unlike most desktop computers with broadband access, mobile devices are often wireless.  This makes determining which website data to transmit and load on the mobile device, especially critical.


Google Page Speed: Desktop

Like mobile browsers, desktops have their own issues that make measuring page speed important.  Some of the issues may be similar to the mobile review but the method of optimization is often different.


Page Speed Recommendations

Leverage Browser Caching

Page load times can be significantly improved by asking visitors to save and reuse the files included in your website.

  • Reduces page load times for repeat visitors
  • Particularly effective on websites where users regularly re-visit the same areas of the website
  • Benefit-cost ratio: high
  • Access needed

more info from GTmetrx

Change the request headers of your resources to use caching. For most people, the way to enable caching is to add some code to a file called .htaccess on your web host/server. This means going to the file manager (or wherever you go to add or upload files) on your webhost. How to leverage browser caching of your website or blog – Varvy

 

Enable Gzip Compression

Reduce the size of files sent from your server to increase the speed to which they are transferred to the browser.

  • Reduce sizes of pages by up to 70%
  • Increase page speed
  • Cost-benefit ratio: high
  • Access needed to the .htaccess files or server administration files
  • original source: read more

Combine Images Using CSS Sprites

Combining images into as few files as possible using CSS sprites reduces the number of round-trips and delays in downloading other resources, reduces request overhead, and can reduce the total number of bytes downloaded by a web page.   read more from GTmetrix

There is a great tutorial from Varry.com about using CSS sprites here.

Be sure to check out the video below from Ricky Quinian

Optimize Images

There are three things you can do to properly optimize your images for your site.
  1. Save The Right Dimensions. You must open the image in Photoshop and view it at a 100%. …
  2. Save Images For Web. It’s possible to reduce the file size without significantly reducing the quality of your images. …
  3. Compress Images For Web.
    Optimizing Images for Web: A Step-By- Step Practical Guide

You might also find the following useful:

Image Optimization

How To Optimize Images For Your WordPress Website

Would You Like Us To Fix This For You?

We understand that some of this technical work can be complicated and overwhelming.  We would like to help.  Our UNLIMITED CONSULTATION upgrade will allow us to COACH you through each issue as needed. Once you resolve a problem, let us know and we will re-compute your audit results and ensure that the fix was done correctly and is no longer a problem.

In addition to UNLIMITED CONSULTATIONS – we will create a custom video tutorial on any fix that is complex or that you are having difficulty with.  You can use these video tutorials as a customized “walk-through” solution, allowing you to do the work only a highly trained professional would know how to do – at a fraction of the cost! Videos are made on request only and require a 72-hour turn around.

This is a great option if you need help, or want to delegate this work to your staff or someone else on your team.

Did You Fix A Problem?

Have you already fixed this and would like to use one of your review credits to have us re-score your accessibility results?  Simply click below to have your auditor check your progress!

Your Audit includes up to (3) three “rechecks”.  Our records indicate that you have not used one of your three credits to have us re-evaluate your results.

Unlimited Consultations, Reviews and Video Training

Sure, you can probably do some of this work yourself.  But, we are here to help and we have no desire to ‘nickel and dime’ you. Our UNLIMITED package is perfectly designed to give you direct coaching on issues you want to resolve yourself while providing you all the years of combined experience our team has through the use of customized video training.

Your Audit Quicklinks

Audit Summary – Website Accessibility – Website Indexation – Domain Level Analysis – On-Page Ranking Factors – External Trust – Competitive Analysis – Social Media Presence – Website Usability Testing – Keyword Reach Findings – Page Speed Insights