Why is speed optimization so important?

The Mobile-First Index was introduced for the first time in 2018. The key change here is that when a search engine looks at your website, the search engine rates two different versions of your domain. Firstly, your website is rated as it would be found by a mobile device and secondly, the desktop version is rated.

The traffic generated by mobile devices has long overtaken traffic from computers. Google has also recognized this and gives the mobile version of your website a higher weighting. The effect is that search engines crawl the mobile version of your website first. This is why we also speak of Mobile-First Indexing.

Your website can achieve completely different positions in the search results for mobile devices as well as for desktop devices! Therefore it is important to optimize both versions. Experience shows that the mobile version of the site is too often neglected.

Google is pushing new technologies to reduce page size

Google is trying to inform all webmasters that you should optimize your web pages for mobile devices as well. Besides several announcements, Google has developed and updated dozens of tools in the last years to help you optimize loading times.

What you as a webmaster can derive from these efforts: Loading time and speed are extremely important for websites & search engines. Studies of shop operators even show that the loading time of websites has a direct influence on the achieved turnover.

In addition, user experience plays a huge role in search engine optimization. Search engines can evaluate the usefulness of a page by means of retention time and jump rates.
Tools like pingdom.com show you the actual loading time of your website.

WordPress loading time of our customer Dr. Svenja Giessler from Munich

The Search Console also displays data on how quickly your website loads.

Evaluation of the loading time in the new Google Search Console

Similar tools such as GTmetrix or Pagespeed Insights (now even the Search Console) provide direct recommendations for action.

Evaluation of the WordPress website of our client: Dr. Svenja Giessler from Munich

Tools such as Test my Site with Google focus on showing what impact speed has on your sales.

With the Speedtest “Test my Site with Google” webmasters can see how much turnover is lost due to insufficient loading times

A tutorial for optimizing WordPress speed would go beyond the scope of this article. Therefore we recommend to read our separate tutorial on speed optimization at this point.

The best and fastest results can be achieved by a specialized web hosting (e.g. Raidboxes*) or by a caching plugin. At this point, we can recommend the tutorial: “Improve the loading time of your WordPress website with WP-Rocket“.

However, a complete tutorial on how to optimize your WordPress website would go beyond the scope of this article. Therefore we recommend that you read our separate tutorial on speed optimization at this point.

In the next step of our SEO audit, we use professional tools to find technical errors on the website that make our WordPress website difficult to read.

Filed under: SEO Audit