The loading speed of your website is a fundamental element to improve the SEO positioning of your page and climb positions in the SERP. For this reason, Google has incorporated the loading speed as one of the main elements within Web Vitalsa tool intended for owners and developers to check the loading speedthe responsiveness and the user experience of its website.

What does Web Vitals measure?

The Core Web Vitals are made up of 3 essential metrics for your SEO positioning:

1. LCPmeasures the perceived speed of loading. Many pages load the main content first and then gradually take care of the secondary content. If your website loads in 2.5 seconds or lessis that it has a good speed.
2. FIDFID: quantifies the responsiveness and user experience when first interacting with the web content. Pages should have an FID of less than 100 milliseconds.
3. CLSThe visual stability check: measures visual stability and watches for unexpected changes in the design that make navigation difficult. For example, clicking on a button sometimes causes it to move because the page is not fully loaded. According to Google, a good CLS is less than 0,1.

Access the Measurements tab to audit your website and check where you need to do more work. If your website has a score between 0 and 49 on the scaleIf you have a good ranking, you will have to make a lot of improvements as your positioning is poor. If it is positioned between 50-89If you do, you will need to apply a number of improvements. From 90 pointsyour website will be considered well optimised.

5 factors that influence your web speed

As we mentioned, taking care of the loading speed of your website is vital to improve SEO positioning. Speed is one of the main elements of quality that Google uses to determine the position of a website when it comes to searching for it.

Google analyses more than 200 quality factors such as the age of the domain, the position of the keywords within the page and the domain, the use of keywords in subdomains, the history of the domain (if it has received penalties or if it has been reported for spam), the title tags and metatags or the length of the content. In this guide you will find the complete list.

And you may ask yourself, what factors influence the loading speed of a website? Among the most common reasons...

1. Use appropriate hosting. Choosing the right hosting is not an easy decision, so if you are thinking of setting up your website, consult us whenever you need to.
2. Choosing the right platform. Compared to free websites, at zapiplay we always recommend you to use a paid hosting. You have multiple CMS available for your website, WordPress, PrestaShop, etc.
3. A lot of code on your website. This is a common problem as many themes contain hidden code such as JavaScritp, CSS and HTML. Look for popular themes that are optimised for fast loading times and SEO and clean them up.
4. Redirections. Redirects are very important to avoid 404 and 500 errors. However, do not abuse them, because if your page has too many redirects, the loading time will be slower.
5. Image size. Optimise your images for SEO, using files such as JPEG, GIF or PNG and make sure that no image exceeds 50 KB in weight. If you want to upload videos to your website, it is best to link them from Youtube or Vimeo to avoid uploading them to the server.

We hope you liked this post and that you get a lot out of it. And remember, better speed means better SEO positioning, we look forward to hearing from you in the comments!