Why is improving web loading speed essential for your business?
The speed of your website is a key point in the functioning of your business. Improving it will directly affect your positioning, the experience of the users who access it and ultimately the metrics you are using to direct the business. We are going to analyze the most important areas that are affected when we improve or worsen our web loading speed and what impact they have on our business.
SEO: The center of attention
Many marketing actions are focused on improving the SEO of our website. And appearing in the first positions to obtain organic traffic is key today for the success of almost any business that has an online presence. For this reason, SEO ends up becoming the center of attention when we assess what improvements to make to a website.
If we improve the speed of the website, we will have a direct impact on its positioning. In the same way, if it worsens we will probably be penalized by the search engines.
All search engines take into account the performance of the websites to position them. In fact, with every passing day the performance of the websites is becoming more important for the engines in terms of positioning.
So that we can understand how they rate websites in terms of speed, both search engines and independent companies are the ones that make specific tools available to us that will serve as a guide. Bing has its Webmaster Tools, Google with Pagespeed Insights or Lighthouse.
There are also independent tools such as Pingdom’s Speed test or GTMetrix. With these tools, we can analyze the speed of our website and quickly see in which areas we can improve or in which aspects our website is working optimally.
What metrics should we work on to improve web loading speed?
Once we obtain the results of these tools, there are many values that can be improved. But if we want to improve performance to improve our positioning in Google and the experience of our users, the following are some of the most interesting metrics that we can try to improve:
1.TTFB (Time To First Byte)
The time to the first byte is the time it takes for the first byte of information sent by the server to reach us. It is important to improve it because if our TTFB is 3 seconds and we lower it to 1 second everything will happen 2 seconds earlier since until the information reaches the browser it cannot begin to be processed to show it to the user.
To improve this value, we have to focus on the execution on the server. The use of caches allows great improvements but is not always an easy solution to implement. Likewise if we are not using the latest version of PHP, then updating it to the latest version will provide us with improvements not only in times but also in the amount of resources consumed on our server so we will be able to serve more traffic with the same amount of resources.
Finally, we have to improve the server. If the server processes the request faster the user will receive it sooner. Many times the server is not given adequate importance but in the end, it is a fundamental part of the chain that will help us with the user experience and positioning.
2. FCP (First Contentful Paint)
The time to first render with content is the time until the browser starts rendering the DOM. The sooner the FCP occurs, the less time the user will be waiting with a blank screen. To improve these times we can use the browser’s cache so that we will avoid HTTP requests and reduce waiting times. We should also minimize the number of requests to elements that block rendering such as style sheets.
3. TTI (Time To Interactive)
The time until the website is interactive is the time the user must wait until the website is ready to respond to the user’s interaction. A website is considered interactive when the FCP has been performed and events have been recorded for the visible elements.
In short, the TTI is the time that tells us when the user has really finished waiting and can start using our website. According to Google, if our website has a TTI of less than approximately 5 seconds, it will be above 75% of websites, users will have a good experience using our website and search engines will not penalize us for performance reasons.
Mobile First
For some time now, the online world has been governed by traffic through mobile devices, which is why Google adopted the mobile first policy. This means that if we have to choose between improving performance in our desktop version or our mobile version, we should improve the mobile version since most of the traffic will probably come to us through that version.
Don’t get obsessed with a metric
With performance optimizations, we aim to improve the overall user experience, since in this way we will also be satisfying the search engines. The problem that we sometimes encounter is that an absolute optimization of a single metric is carried out, for example, if we optimize the TTFB to the maximum but leave aside the FCP we will continue to have a slow website for users and crawlers.
If our TTFB is 4 seconds and we reduce it by 50% we will have reduced it by 2 seconds, but if we reduce it again by 50% we will only have reduced it by 1 extra second. This is what is known as the law of diminishing returns.
If our FCP is also 4 seconds and we had invested the time we used to reduce the second 50% of TTFB to improve 50% of the FCP, we would have managed to reduce the time by 2 seconds with a total of 4 seconds compared to 5 seconds to focus all the optimization on the TTFB. Therefore, what we are looking for is a balanced experience in all its aspects.
Key Takeaways – Benefits of improving the speed of your website
Although we have already talked about the impact it has on positioning, improving the user experience will directly help you with conversions. This growth will not only be reflected directly in traffic but also in the rest of the business metrics, likes sales, etc.
