Website performance is an essential aspect of keeping a high rank in SERPs. Taking time to check a site’s performance, especially for page speed insights, is a must when maintaining your client’s websites. 

Ensuring a quality user experience is now more important than ever before to search engines (especially Google). 

Even though there are several metrics Google measures when determining page speed, you need to pay attention to several Core Web Vitals that will score the speed that your page loads. Understanding the metrics and how to improve your web vitals is beneficial for SEO and page speed. The three metrics you should fully understand include:

  • Largest Contentful Paint or LCP: The point when main content is fully loaded on a page. 
  • Cumulative Layout Shift or CLS: Layout instability and if a site moves up or down unexpectedly. 
  • First Input Delay or FID: Delay when a page is loading, but it can’t interact.

Testing Your Client’s Website Speed

You can find several resources to dive into and learn more about the performance and health of your website. It’s possible to use these to test site performance and performance of the business’s competition. 

Knowing how page speed compares to the competition should be a part of any competitive analysis. In some situations, you may find fixing the mistakes offered by one resource may not improve the scores the way you assumed they would. This is why it is smart to have a few tools you can use together to acquire different recommendations or suggestions to make the needed adjustments or fixes. Google PageSpeed Insights is a free tool you can use for this purpose. 

Improving Page Speed Performance 

After testing performance, you need to fix errors that are slowing down the load times. If you have time, figure out what fixes will be most beneficial to your website’s health. 

Look at the scores and find the site elements that take the longest time to load. These are the ones you need to fix first. 

For example, suppose one of the tracking resources you use indicates it takes 3.43 seconds for a specific element to load. In that case, you can save this amount of load time if you eliminate the element altogether.

Take some time to review each metric you have access to. Determine if there are steps that can be taken to reduce load time and improve the user experience (UX). While this isn’t always possible, making the changes you can, will positively impact your website and the experience visitors have. 

The Benefits of Having Faster Loading Pages 

When your pages load faster, they provide a better user experience. If the pages take too long to load, you may lose customers in seconds. The first step to ensuring good organic ranks and to ensure quality traffic goes to your client’s website is to perform regular page speed tests. With these, you can find out where you can make changes and improve page speed.