To have a website that loads quickly is an important SEO parameter which is steadily growing as a more and more important ranking factor in the On-Site SEO field. If you don’t have a website that loads quickly you risk that potential readers leave the website very quickly, which can hurt your ranking in the search engine results page. The reason being that Google and other search engines wish to give their customers the best possible user experience. Imagine that you visit five websites in a row, where they load excruciatingly slowly – your first reaction would be that the search engine you used must be of inferior quality and unable to find relevant and quality rich websites, so you start using a competitor’s search engine instead. Google and other search engines therefore keep an eye on how fast their indexed websites load and reward those that load quickly.

To make sure your website loads quickly is therefore an important thing to consider and at Jaskov Consult we have several years’ experience with helping companies become speed optimized so they don’t risk losing revenue as a result of customers leaving the site. Speed optimization contains several different techniques but the most common way to do it is to run the website through an analyzer tool, where you systematically go through the different points of optimization and ensure that the website’s speed increases.

The most typical reasons for a slow loading speed for a website are page caching being turned off, a slow back-end (server), missing compression of images and other media files, location of the server, missing scaling in regards to number of visitors, too many plugins or an out-dated CMS.

As the above examples show speed optimization is of the more technical nature in the field of on-page SEO, but one should not be intimidated by this fact as there is a lot to gain from performing this type of optimization. In co-operation we will find out what can be done to your website and at the same time plan a strategy for how these problems best can be solved. The symptoms have varying grades of complexity in regards to how time consuming they are to fix but no matter what there is always a solution.

Of the most simple solutions we find recommendations such as changing the website’s CMS to WordPress if the website currently uses an outdated CMS that no longer receives updates or perhaps was a temporary solution back when there was no better options – WordPress hasn’t been popular since the inception of the internet, so a lot of older websites have a different CMS. At the other end of the scale we have a symptom such as back-end problems causing slow loading (server location, caching or scaling), which take a bit more time to solve as it usually requires communication with the server provider. A good solution here is to use a cloud-based hosting solution such as Amazon Web Services or similar as you thereby automatically gain access to choosing the server location yourself (they have servers all around the world) and furthermore the ability to turn page caching on or off depending on your needs. Lastly you only pay for the server space you require, which means that it automatically scales up when the visitor numbers exceeds the norm.