Publishing high-quality content is a very important piece of the marketing puzzle, but you also need to keep an eye on the design of your webpages to increase and maintain organic traffic. If you have recently seen a drop off in traffic or are struggling to improve your ranking in SERPs, then it may be time to run the rule over mobile page speed.
Google continues to update search for a mobile-first world, as evidenced by the release of a major Speed Update in summer 2018 that made mobile experience a primary signal in rankings. If your content is slow to load, then you could get left behind. Here are a few tips for addressing the problem.
Run the Insights tool
Google’s own PageSpeed Insights tool is a very useful resource for testing speed. It also grades on the tougher end of the scale, so if you can eke out a good score here, then you will be good to go. Scores range from 0 to 100, and it is fair to say that you will need to do some work if you are currently languishing in single digits.
Look at your competitors
Analysing the performance of your competitors’ pages can unearth compelling insights about page speed and also help to determine whether it is negatively impacting your traffic. Run the PageSpeed Insights tool on several websites that are positioned above you in search rankings and take note of their scores. You should complete these tests at different times of the day to remove anomalies and gain a better overview of performance.
Quick fixes
If your mobile page speed is lagging behind key competitors, it is time to shake things up. Fortunately, there are a few tactics that you can employ immediately without a complete website overhaul. First up, remove any image sliders and instead opt for a single image and text overlay as the former are known to hinder page speed. It is also important to use next-gen image formats such as JPEG XR and to jettison any unused tracking codes as they are digital noise and can be a burden on page load.
