When people land on a website that takes more than a few seconds to load, it’s more than likely they aren’t going to hang around for long.
When they leave, this is known as ‘bouncing’ and affects your site’s ‘bounce rate’. This sends negative signals to search engines, informing them that the site isn’t currently giving the best experience to its users.
In an ideal world, your users should land on your site and hang around for a while, buy something, or both!
The longer they stay on your site browsing and buying, the more positive search engines will consider your website to be (and hopefully bump up your ranking positions).
One study by Portent found that B2C e-commerce websites with pages that load in less than a second convert 2.5x more than sites with an average 5-second load speed.
For B2B sites, this rises to 3x more conversions over the same time period.
As a result, slower websites often find themselves slipping in search rankings, especially on mobile.
How important is page speed for seo?
In 2021, Google rolled out Core Web Vitals as part of its page experience update.
This placed even more emphasis on speed-related metrics like Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) and First Input Delay (FID), which directly impact how your site ranks.
Again, the faster your site, the better your chances of appearing higher in search results, especially when competing in tight markets.
Plus, not only does speed affect how Google perceives your site, but it also affects how quickly it can crawl and index your pages.
A slow-loading site may limit how many pages Googlebot crawls in a session, which could prevent new or updated content from showing up quickly in search results.
So make sure your website runs quickly for both people and search engine algorithms.
If you’re running your website on WordPress, you might find our article on how to speed up your WordPress website helpful.
How to Scale Your Website Alongside SEO
It’s one thing to have a fast website that your users enjoy, but if it isn’t bringing in profit and not turning readers into buyers, you’re not going to scale your business.
Whether that means more traffic, more content or more complex features, knowing how to scale your website is incredibly important to building a sustainable business and having scope to grow long term.
Putting this into a practical example, let’s say you’ve just launched a new product and your traffic spikes due to a successful PPC campaign, or an article or video you published goes viral and gets a tonne of backlinks and organic traffic. Great news, right?
Well, yes and no, because if your site isn’t built to scale, that surge can lead to slow load times, broken pages, or even full crashes.
All of that leads to frustrated users (and search engines) and potentially profit loss..
This is why having a scalable structure is super important. Platforms like 20i’s autoscaling hosting are designed to automatically allocate resources during traffic spikes, ensuring your website stays fast and responsive no matter how many visitors show up.
Scalability matters for businesses of every size. Whether you’re growing your blog, adding more eCommerce products or running regular promotions, your site needs to grow and scale with you.
Quick Tips and Tricks to Improve Speed & Scalability
Right, here’s what you came here for. Now that we’ve covered why speed and scalability matter, let’s talk about how to improve both without needing a full-blown dev team.
- Optimize Images and Media
One of the biggest things that butchers website speed is large, uncompressed images.
The best way to get around this is to use tools or plugins that compress images without sacrificing quality. Consider modern formats like WebP for better performance.
- Enable Caching
Caching helps your site load faster by storing versions of pages so they don’t have to be rebuilt every time someone visits.
Most WordPress caching plugins are easy to set up and can significantly improve load times.
- Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
A CDN distributes your website’s content across multiple servers around the world, allowing users to access it from a location closer to them geographically.
This minimizes the time it takes for content to load, especially if your audience is spread across different regions.
- Choose Lightweight Themes and Plugins
Not all WordPress themes are created equal. Look for ones that are well-coded and optimized for performance. The same goes for plugins – too many, or poorly built ones, can slow your site to a crawl.
Technically speaking, A cleaner codebase leads to three big benefits:
- Faster page rendering.
- Fewer conflicts.
- And a more stable performance.
These three benefits can indirectly support SEO by creating a smoother, more reliable user experience.
- Keep Mobile in Mind
Google uses mobile-first indexing, which means your site’s mobile version is what gets evaluated for ranking. So, make sure your site is responsive, loads quickly on smartphones, and doesn’t rely on heavy scripts that slow things down.
A mobile-optimized site is easier for users to navigate and faster to load, leading to higher engagement and better placement in mobile search results, which is essential, given how many users now browse and shop on their phones.
If you’re using WordPress, many of these fixes can be done with plugins or lightweight adjustments. For more ideas, check out our full article on boosting your SEO with a high-performance WordPress setup
Final Thoughts
When it comes to improving your website’s performance in search engines, it’s easy to get caught up in content, keywords, and backlinks. But speed and scalability are often the foundation that everything else rests on. A fast, responsive website delivers a much better experience for your visitors and also tells search engines that your site is worth ranking.
Whether you’re a small business owner running a service-based site or an eCommerce store managing hundreds of products, the benefits of improving your site speed and scalability are huge as they can lead to higher rankings, longer engagement, increased conversions, and better ROI.
Best of all, these improvements aren’t out of reach. With the right hosting, smart use of caching and image optimization, and a focus on clean design, you can give your website a noticeable edge without rebuilding it from the ground up.
At Web Eminence, we help small businesses build websites that perform, both for users and for Google. Whether you need help with SEO, PPC, or designing a website that’s built to scale, get in touch – we’d love to help you grow!