Your SERP May Be Useless If Your Website Loads Slowly

Page loading times are one of those Google search algorithm ranking signals that are often misunderstood. The speed at which pages load will certainly reflect upon how high your website ranks on the search engine results page (SERP), but you may not witness this effect right away. Let's say you are ranking high on certain keywords and your organic traffic is booming thanks to a good marketing strategy; these two signals will bestow your website with an optimal SERP ranking, but if the page loading speeds are terrible, competitors with faster sites will easily overtake you.

Using speed measurement tools such as GTMetrix and Google PageSpeed Insights is a must for website administration and search engine optimization professionals. While hosting platforms play a major role in terms of providing fast loading times, there are technical SEO issues that the aforementioned tolls will detect. The most important metric measured by PageSpeed Insights is the time-to-first-byte, which happens to be a ranking factor that may come back to haunt you if it is not addressed.

Many of the technical SEO issues should be simple enough to fix on your own. As for hosting, managed virtual private servers are usually the way to go. If you notice your organic traffic coming from recommendations, you should also take a look at your bounce rate to determine whether slow-loading pages are testing the patience of your visitors. When bounce rates are higher than 50%, page speeds may be to blame.

Keep in mind that returning visitors are more likely to exercise patience if they know the content they are getting will be good; the page loading speed problem is more often seen when the website analytics show a higher bounce rate for new visitors, particularly if they are coming from major search engines such as Bing and Google. As previously mentioned, it won't be long until competitors with faster websites climb up the SERP.

In the end, page loading speeds can make or break a good SERP rank, but you may not notice the negative impact until it is too late. On the other hand, if your speedy site is lagging behind competitors, you may need to reconsider content and user experience instead. For more information click here https://www.reddit.com/r/SEO/comments/fgftpj/mysitescoreshorriblyforpagespeedbutis/.