Yes, page speed is crucial for improving SEO ranking, and it can significantly impact your website's performance in search engine results pages (SERPs). This holds true for my website, https://keerthysooraj.com, as well as any other site on the internet. Here's why page speed matters for SEO:
User Experience: Google and other search engines prioritize delivering a great user experience to their users. A slow-loading website frustrates visitors and can lead to a high bounce rate (people leaving your site quickly). When users bounce, it sends a signal to search engines that your content may not be relevant or valuable, which can negatively impact your rankings.
Mobile-First Indexing: Google has shifted to a mobile-first indexing approach, which means it primarily uses the mobile version of your site for ranking and indexing. Mobile users often have slower internet connections, so a fast-loading mobile site is critical for SEO. Slow mobile loading times can result in lower rankings.
Core Web Vitals: Google has introduced Core Web Vitals as a ranking factor. These vitals include metrics like Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Input Delay (FID), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), all of which are related to page speed and user experience. Meeting these criteria can improve your SEO ranking.
Crawl Budget: Search engines allocate a limited amount of time and resources to crawl and index websites. If your site is slow, search engine bots may not be able to crawl as many pages as they should, potentially missing important content. This can impact your visibility in search results.
Competitive Advantage: In the competitive world of SEO, every advantage counts. If your website loads faster than your competitors', it can attract and retain more visitors, leading to better engagement metrics and potentially higher rankings.
To improve the page speed of my website, https://keerthysooraj.com, I considered these following steps:
Optimize Images: Compress and resize images to reduce their file size without compromising quality.
Leverage Browser Caching: Configure your server to instruct browsers to cache resources, reducing load times for returning visitors.
Minimize HTTP Requests: Reduce the number of elements on your web pages, such as scripts and stylesheets, to minimize the number of server requests.
Eliminate Render-Blocking Resources: Optimize your website's code to minimize the impact of render-blocking JavaScript and CSS.
Consider AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages): Implement Google's AMP framework for mobile pages to improve mobile load times.
Regularly Monitor and Test: Continuously monitor your website's performance and conduct speed tests using tools like Google PageSpeed Insights or GTmetrix. Make adjustments as needed.
