Loading time, or site speed as it is also called, is the time it takes for a webpage to fully load in a browser after a user has clicked on a link or typed in a URL.Site speed is an important indicator of how a website performs because slow loading times can negatively affect user experience, search engine ranking, and overall website performance.
Google har själva sedan 2010 använt sig av laddningstid som en betydande faktor för rankning. Det beror på att Google vill ge relevanta svar på sökaren fråga snabbt och effektivt. Har du en långsam sida så uppfyller du inte dessa krav. Förutom det är sidans laddningstid viktig av flera anledningar:
Users are more likely to stay on a website and engage with its content if it loads quickly. Slow loading times can lead to user frustration and cause them to leave a site.
Google launched its Core Web Vitals updates and showed how much loading times matter. In the Core Web Vitals that Google refers to, loading times, interactivity, and visual stability are included. That’s why it is important to start by reviewing your site’s speed. Websites that load quickly have a better chance of ranking higher in the SERPs.
A fast website increases the chance that visitors will convert into customers. If your website takes too long to load, visitors may become impatient and leave before completing desired actions, such as making a purchase or filling out a form. By optimizing your website’s speed, you can increase your conversion rate and improve sales or get closer to reaching other goals.
Loading time can be measured in several different ways:
Fully Loaded Page:The time it takes to load all resources on the webpage.
Time to First Byte: The time it takes before the page starts loading from the first exchange of information with the server.
First Meaningful Paint/First Contextual Paint: The time it takes for the page to load the most essential content, often referred to as “above the fold.”
Of course, you don’t need to calculate how long it takes for your website to load by yourself. There are several tools available to measure loading time and evaluate it.
Web hosting plays a major role in website speed. Choose a reliable and fast provider to improve loading time.
Images usually take up the most space on a website. Make sure to compress them so that they take up less space, thereby reducing the loading times of your website.
Your website is built on code. Cleaning up this code and compressing it can help improve loading times. You can go through the following different parts of your website and see if there is anything you can optimize, for example:
Where possible, you can either compress them or use a CDN. What a CDN does is keep the resources uploaded on a server, and when a user needs them, they are downloaded from the server that is closest to the user.
This is more relevant for returning visitors. Cache allows users to store your information in their browser, which means it will load faster the next time. This is a perfect addition to the other approaches we mentioned above and also helps improve the overall experience on your website.
Loading time is an important factor for SEO. Long loading times can negatively affect user experience, search engine rankings, and website performance. Improve your loading times by measuring load speed, optimizing images, using a CDN, enabling cache, and more.