Why Your Website’s Performance Matters for SEO (and How to Improve It)

When we talk about SEO, we often hear the same things.

To have a good ranking on search engines, you have to chose the right keywords, have nice texts including them (if possible, a blog), and good backlinks.

We almost never hear about websites’ performances, except for images size, sometimes.

But guess what: performance does matter, and no, compressing your images is not the only thing you can do — and it’s far from being sufficient.

It’s today’s topic: how you can optimize your website’s performance for SEO.

About Website Performances

Before explaining why performances matter in SEO (and they do!), let’s make a quick stop to define what makes your website fast or slow.

A non-tech person will tell you “probably the images”. But we’re techies here, so we have to be more precise to know what impacts the loading time and what we should improve.

Here is a non exhaustive list of what can slow down your website:

• Heavy images, of course
• Heavy or non-minified internal JavaScript & CSS files
• External libraries (JS, CSS frameworks, fonts, etc.) long to load
• Too many/heavy API requests (either your own or external ones)
• Unoptimized code

Every element of this list can have a significant impact on your loading time, and therefore, your ranking on search engines like Google or Bing.

We’ll see in the last part of this article how to improve the loading time.

But first, let me explain why they can have an impact on SEO.

Why Do Performances Matter in SEO

One could think: I have optimized my keywords, I have a blog, texts include the right keywords, the meta tags are filled… So everything is fine! Even if my website is a bit slow, search engines’ bots won’t care!

Well, it’s a bit more complicated, and bad performances can have a significant negative impact on SEO.

Let’s break it down in a few points.

Poor Mobile Performances and Search Engine Bots

Google crawls website using a mobile-first policy. Which means its bots voluntarily mar the loading speed to imitate someone using a bad mobile device.

And slow-loading websites obviously perform poorly on mobile devices, therefore leading to a negative impact on SEO.

Search Engines’ Crawl Budget

Search engines’ bots have a limited “crawl budget”: a limited amount of time to crawl a website.

If a bot spends too much time on one webpage (because of its slow performance), it’ll have less time to crawl the rest of the website (and to index the other pages).

High Bounce Rate

A slow-loading website, especially on mobile devices, will lead to a poor a UX and a high bounce rate.

Although a search engine doesn’t know when a user leaves a webpage, it can have an idea of the bounce rate by measuring the time after which a user goes back to the search engine result page after clicking on your link — if they ever go back to that page.

And that’s not all.

But you got the idea: a slow website can drastically effect your ranking on search engines.

How to Improve Your Website Performance for a Better Ranking

So, here is the million dollar question: how to improve a website’s performance to optimize its ranking?

Well, there is several ways.

I’m not going to focus on technologies here (SSR, which framework to avoid, etc.), the article is already long enough.

I’m going to list some key points to improve your ranking that don’t depend on the technologies you use.

Monitor Your Performances

The first thing you should do is monitoring the performances of your website. How could you know what to improve if you don’t know what’s wrong with it?

For this, you can obviously use Google’s PageSpeed Insights, that acts like Chrome Lighthouse, and tells you what makes your website slow.

You can use more simple tools as well, such as SpeedMeter, a Chrome extension that lists the network requests of your website, showing which ones are slow — and therefore which ones to improve.

Improve Your Website

Now… well it’ll depends on what is wrong with your website. If you notice some elements are very slow and they shouldn’t, I think asking Google (or ChatGPT) could provide you with answers, or ideas.

A few things you can take into account, though:

• Use .webp images instead of .png or .jpeg; also resize these images to the size you need
• Reduce as much as possible API requests, by storing data locally, or even hard code some data, like I did with the categories on Indie Dev Tools (the ones listed in the footer, are not fetched anymore but stored as a constant in my code)
• Use data cache
• Use a CDN
• Improve your code (review all your code, I’m pretty sure there is some useless stuff that slow down your website).

Once you’ve improved your website, and have verified it using Insights or SpeedMeter, submit again your website to Google, through a sitemap.xml, or directly via the Search Console.

You’ll need a few days/weeks to see the impact, but it optimizing your website speed should have, indeed, in impact.

Conclusion

I hope that this article actually taught you a few things about SEO and performances, and gave you a few ideas about how to improve it.

If you want to improve your SEO even more, I created a guide to help you implement programmatic SEO, with all the code provided.

And if you have any question, please leave a comment!

Hey! I’m Alex, a developer and solopreneur.

I create a lot of tools and products using different technologies, and write about it. Here are a few of my products:

→ SEO Programming: A guide to learn how to do SEO with code (and only code!).

→ Lite Feedback: a feedback popup to integrate on any website, with a single line of code.

And more you can find on my Linktree page !