Page speed is the most important metric for any site. Not only does a slow loading page make for a poor user experience, but your SEO score will suffer as well. Google’s algorithms are checking for good loading times. That means faster pages will lead to better SEO results. Better SEO results lead to more users, and users coming to a fast loading site will stick around that much longer.
So what can you do to make sure your pages don’t go lost and unread?
Follow these tips for how to boost page speed for each post on your blog…
Know your current page speed
No need for a lot of writing on this. You can easily check your page speed with the Google page speed tool.
Once you know where you stand, you can being to implement the recommended optimizations.
Keep image sizes below 1 MB
A great site needs great images. However, it is a misconception that these images need to be of the highest resolution. Image files that are too large are the number one factor in slow load times. There are many tools to help compress your images without losing quality.
As a rule of thumb, keep all images below 1 MB. If using a product like Photoshop make sure to save all images for “web”. This will save a smaller file version, optimized for web placement.
If you don’t have professional design software try a plugin. Plugins like WP Smush will optimize all images on your blog.
Use Browser Caching
Every element on your page has to be downloaded by users. This means that every time your site is loaded every image, logo, recipe card, pixel, video, etc. has to be downloaded on to your user’s browser. As you can imagine that can really slow down a page load.
But there’s an easy way to reduce slowdown without cutting elements from your pages. You can set up your website so that it tells readers’ browsers to save the things it downloads from your site. This is called browser caching.
When you use caching, the visitor’s browser only has to download a given element once, and then it’s already ready to load every time they visit your site.
The best way to implement browser caching is by using a plugin. There are many different caching plugins, but please make sure to let us know if you recently implement a new caching plugin. There is a chance that certain plugins can affect ad serving.
How page speed affects ad earnings
As we’ve discussed, a faster page will lead to better SEO, more users and a decreased bounce rate. More eyes on your pages will translate to more ad impressions.
However, it’s not just the increase in traffic that will really boost those ads. Page performance has a huge affect on ad performance. Faster loading sites will also have faster loading ads. These faster loading ads will lead to better viewability scores, which is what premium advertisers are after. Ads on faster loading pages are more valuable because the ads will load before the user scrolls past or clicks away.
Additionally, the better the site experience the more engaged your users will be. This means higher time on site. This higher time on site also leads to more viewable ads, additional ad opportunities from the ad refresh and higher click through rates as users are more likely to click an ad that they’ve fully viewed for a period of time.
A fast loading site is a big important step in becoming a professional blogger. Make sure to implement the above suggestions and Make sure to take advantage of our newest and fastest ad tags by clicking here.
Happy Blogging!
