Maintaining a high ranking in the SERPs requires a high-performing website. Checking your site’s performance, particularly your page speed insights, regularly is a must for any SEO. As Google prepares for its Page Experience Update in May 2021, a great user experience is becoming increasingly important to search engines, particularly Google.
Understanding Page Speed Insights
Users expect to be able to interact with a website in a matter of seconds. If the content isn’t loading or they can’t interact with your site right away, they’ll quickly leave.
As said by many of the brand management agency, while Google considers various metrics when determining page speed, there are three Core Web Vitals that determine how quickly your page content loads. As Google prepares to severely impact sites with their May update, understanding these metrics and how to correct your web vitals will be beneficial to your page speed and SEO. The following are the three metrics you should be familiar with:
LCP (Largest Contentful Platform) is the largest content platform. When the main content of a page is loaded, it is referred to as paint.
CLS – Cumulative Layout Shift is a type of layout instability that occurs when content shifts up or down, and you interact with parts of a site you didn’t intend to interact with.
FID – First Input When a page loads but you can’t interact with it right away, this is delayed.
How to test site speed
There are various resources available to help you learn more about your website’s health and performance. You can use them to evaluate the performance of both your own and your competitors’ websites. A competitive analysis should include a comparison of your page speed to that of your competitors. It’s possible that correcting the errors provided by one resource did not improve your scores in the way that you expected. As a result, it’s critical to have various tools that you can combine to turn various suggestions or recommendations into fixes. Any of the resources listed below can be used to run a page speed test.
Page Speed Insights from Google. Lighthouse is another name for Page Speed Insights. It analyses and calculates your page on both mobile and desktop to give you an overall performance score. You may notice that the scores fluctuate if you test your page multiple times. There are various reasons for this, including device testing, browser extensions, traffic routing, and more. Instead of a single number, Google suggests thinking of your site’s performance as an overall score that includes multiple scores.
Rectifying Errors
It’s time to fix any errors slowing down your load times after you’ve tested performance. If you have the time, consider which fixes will have the greatest impact on the health of your website.
Examine your results, identify your site’s elements that take the longest to load, and address them first. For example, if Lighthouse reports that render-blocking resources take 4.16 seconds to load, you can save up to 4.16 seconds by removing render-blocking resources.
Users appreciate faster pages, and they have a better overall experience. You could lose customers in seconds if your pages take too long to load. Performing page speed tests to understand where you can improve page speed is the first step in maintaining good organic rankings and quality traffic to your site.
