Oren Shatz – Chairman at SEO ISRAEL

This super detailed session was delivered by Oren Shatz, chairman at SEO ISRAEL.

As a digital marketer, page loading speed is extremely important. However, that is easier said than done. What are the things that we need to focus on to help?

To state the obvious, quicker loading pages equals more traffic, happier users, more sales, and increased number of return customers. Unfortunately, many webpages don’t pay attention to the page load times. In fact, according to Google, if you increase your load time from 1 second to 10 seconds, you have a 123% increase in page abandonment. In addition, if your mobile site takes more than 3 seconds to load, you will see a 53% abandonment rate on that particular page. In other words, if your page loads slowly, you are losing a lot of money! In 2018, Google realized how important page load times were that they included it as a factor in their ranking algorithm.

This gives everyone a chance to get their traffic to rank better. However, how does Google actually define page load times? Google gave users two big tools to help with this: Google Search Console and Google Analytics. However, there are big issues with both. In Google Search Console you can see how long it took the Google bot to see your page. However, it only shows the time it took to create the HTML. For a real person, it could take much longer before they can actually see the content of your page. On the other hand, Google Analytics give some more interesting data. It shows how long it took actual users to load a full page. However, the problem with it is that it only gives a small sample (1%) of the data.

Now Google is developing better ways to track real page load times through their tool Lighthouse. They are tracking several parameters including first contentful paint, first meaningful paint, first CPU idle, speed index, and Time to Interactive.

It is important to note that the Google algorithm is constantly changing and evolving. However, at the same time it is important to know that it is very important.

In order to work on page loading speed there are a lot of things you can do. One of the most important areas to focus on is critical path rendering. This helps you optimize the rendering of your page and allow it to progressively load. Another important thing to do is to defer JavaScript. This allows you to ask Google to only load JavaScript after the page has fully loaded, thus decreasing page load times. Lastly, a great way to improve load times is to make sure that your main content is in HTML.