The Winning Metric Page Speed There is More to Core Web Vitals

 User Experience & The Right Answer to the Query

The search engines have a difficult task at their hand their prime focus is on returning the best or most matching answer in response to a query. With many contenders for the top rank, it becomes difficult to rank and attract traffic. Thus regular check-up or Audit is imperative in times of mobile-first indexing.

Who is First on SERP? 

Despite priority accorded to the best answer, the delivery matters too. One aspect is the downloading speed of the page that provides the most suitable answers to the query. Most of the negative metrics filter out the website before it could rank at the top in the SERP. But that very website, when it is providing the best answer to a given search term will certainly be called for. The battle on the SERP now hangs tight between the contenders if there are more than two sites with the right solution vying against each other. Thus positive page attributes matter.

How to optimize Page Download Speed?  

Almost everything on board a website impacts the page download speed the extent of the impact may vary hence web developers or designers would follow Agile methodology as it is iterative. Unfortunately, web designing has become highly competitive all over the World and that has brought down the development cost that the agencies charge. This is not good! 

In lieu of less money, most agencies carry out a quickfire design and development job.  Website owners are less literate about the elements on board and their quality. They get a functional website but are ignorant of its ranking capabilities on the search engine result pages. Even when used as a referral, the speed matters, no one whether on the browser or in an email message containing the URL likes a slow download. Irrespective of the nature of the web page it should load within 3 seconds or less. The user experience declines as the downloading time increase.  Some negative impacts may not slow the page but they are definitely responsible for a bad page experience.

Let's make a list of elements that impact negatively;

• Heavy Images
• Animated Videos
• Heavy Infographics 
• Unstable Widgets
• Pop-Ups
• Intruders (Overlays)
• Too many sever queries
• Unused Scripts
•  Outdated Hosting Solutions
•  Inappropriate bandwidth 
• Absence  of server modules (Apache/Nginx
• Not Subscribing to HTTPS secure site
• Malicious codes, Malware, viruses, etc.
• No Security Checks
• On-Page interruptions 
• Unresponsive web page
• Ill-designed link architecture
• Unused WP Plug-Ins 
• Unused Scripts & Dead Codes
• Too many server queries 

For a slow page, the solutions to the problems are not difficult to execute but some irritants such as pop-ups, ads, dialog boxes, or interstitials, are more a matter of policy than that of the technology. 

Google recommends the use of  web.dev page speed insight tool for a site audit as regards the download speed. Besides the diagnostic, the tool also provides recommendations as solutions to the anomalies regarding page performance. You should set your technical/developer team to work on those solutions.  

https://pagespeed.web.dev/

The tool has been recently updated to accord a real-time page experience analysis on Chrome. 

Another tool that I have used and recommend is:

https://gtmetrix.com/

Screen Shot Page Performance

Page Speed Modules when installed optimize your website and are highly recommended they are open source.

https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/module

Website owners should focus on core web vital performance reports and implement the solutions. As mentioned above website security and hosting play an important role. Good hosting solutions should be implementing state-of-the-art technology not only as regards the server, it should also provide security with any outages. Web site owners are least aware of the implication of a poor hosting solution. It is up to web designers to select advanced hosting solutions. This decision should be based not only for search engine optimization, but the website designers also should educate the owners about the trouble-free page experience that their visitors will get.

 

A secure hosting environment will prevent hacking and virus attacks, these attacks that could lead to a penalty.  Encryption of data during transmission provides additional security and this is possible while using SSL or Secure Socket Layer provided by the host. The s you see in form of HTTP is a sign of a site using SSL. 

Hosting Server Location

I always suggest that web designers recommend CDN network as hosting solution. These are cloud-based and secure. They enhance speed by delivering the site to the browser from the nearest location. 

Some of the most popular web hosts are:'

• Go Daddy
• HostGator
• Google Cloud Platform
• Bluehost 
• WPEngine
• Amazon Web Services

Website owners should always host sites on the nearest servers based on the target location. This is a good search engine optimization practice as it prevents tine consuming server hops.   

To the readers, it should be obvious how important the page download speed is for performance on the world wide web. Ask your web designers to implement solutions that will provide quick access and fast download for a better page experience for your clients. 

Read More Page Speed Solutions

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Uday works as an SEO and content writer in a web development company in Mumbai in Maharashatra. Besides digital marketing, he creates content on YouTube. He worked as a naturalist but now his sole focus is on online marketing, writing, and SEO.       

Author 

Slow Page Download Solutions for Webmasters & Designers

Slow Download Page Speed Ramifications 

I have on a number of occasions deserted the page offering solutions I had queried for. We human beings have a short attention span, and this is most visible on the SERPs when the page is slow to download. In the case of the Internet, speed matters whether we download a web page, an image or download video, or a pdf file. 

Page Speed is dependent upon many elements or attributes that a web page comprises. Besides losing the visitors the page if not able to download within 3 seconds is bound to lose at least 50% of the visitors. This is a substantial loss and calls for a solution:

 What to Do? Solutions for Slow Page Download

• Replace Animated GIFs with HTML5 Videos
• 
  
• Serve Images in Next-Gen Format
• 
  
• Efficiently Code Images (Specify Height & Width) 
• 
  
• Reduce Initial Server Response
• 
  
• Eliminate Render Blocking Images

Animated GIFS though are interactive and effective but slow down the page speed and require uninterrupted Internet connectivity. It is better to convert them to HTML 5 Videos or replace them entirely with videos. Remember images take up nearly 21% of a web page weight.   

Unlike the next-gen image formats like PNG and JPG GIFs cannot be compressed (they accept only lossless compression) hence only a milli-second image can blow out to a size of many megabytes. Slow frame rates and bad color representations are other drawbacks.   Animation technology uses more storage and memory space. It uses more bandwidth.

*Lossy filter compression reduces quality and lossless filter compression requires rendering to the original on the webpage. Tools = Photoshop, FileOptimizer, or ImageOptim, Adobe Affinity.

HTML 5 Videos do not require plugins like Flash they can be effectively played on the browsers. HTML 5 Videos exhibit splendid colors, are light in weight, and offer a better experience to the visitors. 94% of video compression formats use MP4 Format. While OGG and WebM are not that popular. Autoplay and creating a loop is easy with <video> encoding in the case of HTML5. 

The next-gen image formats are more popular these days, especially their compressed formats. But compress them only if they are very large and are visibly slow to download. While compression is required it may slightly mar the quality. Use Google WebM instead.   

Always optimize images for a better UX Experience due to faster download. Small file size also saves on the bandwidth and the CPU Process from extra load.   

The best image compression tools are Adobe Photoshop and Affinity Photo. For WordPress sites there are many plugins available for image optimizations examples:

• Imagify Image Optimizer
• ShortPixel Image Optimizer
• Optimole
• Optimus Image Optimizer
• WP Smush
• TinyPNG
• ImageRecycle 

Reduce Initial Server Response

Server Response time is that taken to download the result page after the client request is made on the browser. The faster is the response the better is the User Experience (UX).

For better server response do the following

• Fast Web Hosting Service
• 
  
• Use CDN Content Delivery Network 
• (Close Target Audience) 
• 
  
• Page Should Load within 3 Seconds

Good Server Response Time

• 0-7.2 ms Blocking
• 
  
• 7.2 ms to 18.3 DNS Lookup
• 
  
• 25.5 ms to .7ms connecting 
• 
  
• 26.6 ms sending to 111.8 ms Waiting 
• 
  
• 138.4 ms to  0. ms receiving
• 
  
• 988.0 ms DOM Loading
• 
  
• 1.22s 1st Contentful 
• 
  
• 1.22 1st Paint 
• 
  
• 1.52 s onload
• 
  
• 2.02s fully loaded

Best Practice for Good Page Download Speed

• Do Not Over Load WP Theme
• 
  
• Delete Unused Plugins, Deactivate others not in use to reduce CPU Usage
• 
  
• Use the latest PHP or the programming Language 
• 
  
• Minify Scripts like External files, Java Scripts and 
• 
  
• Configure Caching
• 
  
• Cache first–process later 

*Remember Static Contents download fast while dynamic contents are slow to download. 

Eliminate Render Blocking Images

Render blocking resources are always in the critical path when download is taking place. They are in the header section or above the fold. 

Usually the resources are: 

• Image first to be downloaded
• 
  
• CSS Next to be downloaded
• 
  
• Java Script 

Your visitors are staring at a blank while the loading is going on this is certainly going to frustrate the visitors to the website. Although there should be minimum executable files in the critical path  sometimes they are unavoidable hence:

• Reduce files in the critical path i.e. above the fold.  
• Optimize the image without losing the quality
• Link CSS to HTML.  <link rel="style.css" href=“style.css"> 
• Combine all CSS Files into one and do not use the import method for the call. 
• Check How Java Script is loading Use Page Insight Tool 
• Insert Java Script at the bottom of the HTML away from the critical path 
• Use W3 Render Cache to remove render-blocking in WP. 

These are some of the suggestions please take the help of tech experts to use some of the suggestions as a webmaster.  The best solution is to make a content-rich simple website with few attributes. 

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Uday provides a search engine optimization service for digital marketing. He provides website content and content for authoritative links. He also works as SEO Content Writer for digital companies on a remote WFH basis.

He also teaches digital marketing in his home town Jabalpur. He can be contacted at: 

pateluday90@hotmail.com

09755089323          

Nitty Gritty of Technical Seo For Better Site Perfromance

Being a practitioner of content based promotion techniques, I am not a programmer or a technical person, but here I wish to inform you that technical aspects of website tuning are important. These action fine tune the website and can be executed with the help of your website programmer or designer. 

Technical SEO practices enable fine tuning of the code and scripts which may be preventing the SE robots from properly crawling and indexing the website. SEO provides solutions such that all targeted content pages are smoothly crawled and indexed by the crawlers.   

If you use the Google site operator site:xyz.com you will get a whole list of pages that have been successfully indexed by the search engine and have found a place on the SERPs.  You can discover these pages by logging in the search console as well. The pages which contain <noindex> in the meta will not be indexed and so will the pages which have been excluded in the robot.txt file. If this is by error please rectify it with immediate effect. 

Dynamic pages can sometimes use too long to respond and may not be indexed properly due to time out issues. 

For some reasons if two pages exists on a website make one canonical in order to avoid duplicate issue.

Session IDs where the server serves same content to the different persons using a changed ID where in a number is added to the URL path. This can cause a duplication problem and the page may be penalized due to confusion caused. 

This problem can also occur due to URL parameter of filtering on eCommerce Site thus producing  the same page content with a different URL.  

A wrongly placed redirect could also cause problems discuss with technical guy in your team. 

Due to some error the page not indexed could be wrongly responding with 404 code. 

Fetch As Google

If the on the search console the number of indexed pages shown does not match with total number of indexable pages in your database you have a crawling issue. Use fetch as google to ascertain the indexing.  

Making A Site Mobile Friendly 

This activity makes the site flexible enough to be show on mobile screens and the changing on link architecture including spaces between the links plausible. 

Create acceptable spaces between the links. Make the size of the font readable. Also the contrast between background and text should be appreciable.

Set up a view port in the meta which instructs browsers to resize according to the mobile screen.

<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1, maximum-scale=1, minimum-scale=1" />

Increase the site speed by optimizing images making them lightweight for images may comprise sixty percent of website weight.  There are many tools that enable online compression. Search on the Net. 

Compressing codes. By compressing codes the website become faster and that helps in user experience or UX as well as decreases bounce rate and hence increase conversions. The two ideal tools for compressing scripts. html, etc are deflate and Gzip. Compression is subject to acceptance by the server.     

For those who understand coding and server programming or management. Here is link offering details of how to compress files for websites .

Also use minification to remove unused elements link comments, variables, formatting and function names all that are used during the programming or are not needed at all. 

Read in detail: Technical Seo 

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Uday provides Internet Marketing Services (SEO)
Write Contents for Websites in English
Runs Digital Marketing Classes in Jabalpur

Contact: pateluday90@hotmail.com

Mobile: 9755089323

Website Accessibility: Usability: On Page Seo & Design Factors

Design & Content Guidelines 

Make a well defined link architecture using few H tags the H1 Tag being used only once. The font size, text to back ground contrast all should make readability easier.The font size used should be 12 preferable or more according to the design.

Whence writing contents use a unique language not copied from any source. Include words that people type to search relevant information in the Internet.

Use low weight but high resolution images labeled and added with the correct alt text. The height and width attributes should be in the place.

Write all important information in text especially headings since the search engines cannot read text embedded in the images. Label each block of content for visitors to know what they are going to read about. 

One of the important factors in on page optimization is website accessibility.  This is applicable to both the users and the search engines.

The configuration of robot.txt file is important this will help keep the less desired pages from search engine crawls while informing them of important pages.

Certain scripts may not gel well with browsers and different form of machines like Ipad etc.


Check whether server is well configured. Use the DNS Check Tool:

When you conduct a ping and trace route test the load time should be less then one minute. The less load time means your website is comparatively faster than many websites.

Mobile Friendly 

Use the view port meta  to make the site more friendly. Place reasonable distance between the links and use the font size as stated above. Above the use of flash and heavy images.

Use rich snippets to best describe your website to search engines. The structured data use should be limited and at present is restricted to  products, reviews, events, local business, videos and software applications. 

For better understanding read guidelines set up by search engines such as Google Guidelines