Optimizing the Upload Speed of Your Blog: Key Tips and Techniques
Trying to optimize the upload speed of your blog is equivalent to optimizing the experience of users visiting your digital space. Besides, that has its value in terms of boosting the ranking in organic results in search engines.
Studies indicate that more than 50% of internet users expect web pages to load between 2 seconds or less. Consequently, as a blogger, you are interested in knowing the importance of optimizing your blog’s response time.
When users click on a link, they want the website to load quickly. By not doing so, they immediately look for another alternative. This means a risk of losing visits and traffic by having a portal with a poor response. Then, it is strategic to check the upload speed of your blog. To do this, you must analyze the status of SEO, used technologies, content, etc.
Upload speed consists of the time it takes to display all your website’s elements in your browser. In other words, it’s the time that elapses from when the internet user clicks on the URL until all the information on your blog appears on its screen.
Why is it vital to optimize the upload speed of your blog?
If you run an online business, you basically must have a blog. It can be a guest blog, your own, even a group blog. Since we are talking about blogging, the need to optimize your blog’s upload speed and make it faster is vital for you. We all know that calls to the server are mostly driven by images and large video files being uploaded and downloaded from your server.
The importance of optimization in affiliate marketing can not be overstated. Optimization does not just refer to optimizing your outputs, such as your images and content, but also your website’s quality and speed. Optimization is essential for affiliate marketing because if you can achieve a very high speed, this will significantly increase your conversions. On the other hand, if you have a very slow site, most potential customers will become discouraged by waiting for too long before viewing the page.
So, you have a blog with some pretty exciting content. You’ve been blogging for a while, and you are beginning to get some traffic.
The question is:
How can you make more money from your blog?
The answer is easy:
Traffic is good, but targeted traffic is better.
To target your traffic correctly, you need to know the key to affiliate marketing: the conversion rate. The conversion rate is the percentage of people who visit your site who will perform the desired action. For example, you might have a blog about cooking, and your desired action is for people to buy a new cookbook. If you generate 10,000 hits per month and 1,000 people buy your cookbook, your conversion rate is 10%.
Blogs are a great way to connect with customers, but if you’re not careful, your blog might be too slow for visitors to read. When you first start a blog, the last thing you want to do is make it hard for people to read your content. Here are some tips to improve your blog speed and optimize it for better search engine rankings.
Start small and customize.
If you have an extensive blog and a sizable audience, you might want to think about starting small and customizing your template and plugins to your needs. This way, you have less work to do when you customize your blog, and you can focus more on writing and getting views.
Internet users who enter a website that does not respond quickly end up leaving. According to Google’s data, 50% of users expect a blog to load in less than two seconds, and for every extra second, the chance of the person leaving increases.
Here’s why it’s vital to optimize your blog’s upload speed.
1.- Bounce rate
In simple terms, the bounce rate is a way to tell if your landing pages are doing their job. According to Kissmetrics, “Google Analytics will calculate your bounce rate as the percentage of single-page visits (one pageview) to your site. A bounce is counted when a single-page visit occurs, as opposed to multiple page views.” A high bounce rate can be alarming for your rankings in search engines.
A bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits to your website. It’s the percentage of visits in which you viewed a single page before the visitor left.
If your blog has a load speed problem, the bounce rate will most likely increase in a short time. The above is an element that negatively affects your website’s assessment in search engines. It’s a value that reflects that visitors leave your page without browsing your website.
Thanks to responsive technology, a high percentage of your visits will come through mobile devices, such as tablets or smartphones. Therefore, your web portal must be optimized for this type of computer.
In this sense, I recommend you to perform load speed tests. On the network, several free use tools measure the response time of your blog.
2.- Conversion rate
If you have a website or online store, the funnel will not work correctly if the process is slow for your users. The Conversion Rate then depends directly on the speed of the web portal. The faster internet users are more likely to enter the blog and interact with the content.
Studies reveal the following:
- If the upload time exceeds 4 seconds, users are most likely leaving the portal.
- It is challenging for users to leave their data, especially to revisit your blog, if they consider it slow. In this sense, if your web portal is an online store, you should review this aspect immediately.
The results indicate how relevant the upload speed of a website is to internet users. In this sense, a single second can mean the difference between achieving loyalty or abandoning.
3.- User experience
Figure 2. According to studies, if the upload time exceeds 4 seconds, users will likely leave the portal.
Working on improving your users’ browsing experience is an effective way to gain a reputation and compete with your niche rivals. But, as I’ve already advanced, a good user experience starts with a quick upload of the page queried.
More than 55% of users say they comment to their followers if they have a bad experience visiting a blog. As a result, it can generate negative advertising, affecting potential customers reaching your website.
4.- Penalization of search engines
Search engines penalize websites that have loading issues, as this affects the user experience. For example, in its business model, Google focuses on delivering the highest possible quality on its results page, searching for an internet user.
For the above, Google penalizes those pages that are slow to load. It is then essential, to avoid such a penalty, that you take care of the following aspects:
- Server quality.
- Deleting unnecessary files.
- Garbage code line debugging.
- Image optimization.
- Turn on the cache to speed up the loading of blog items.
- Optimizes the database.
5.- Improves indexing
If your blog’s upload speed is slow, search engine spiders won’t track all the URLs on your website. This causes not all pages to be indexed. Usually, this happens on blogs that generate a lot of content.
One way to improve indexing is to verify the existence of your sitemap and file.txt; this helps efficiently identify files on your server.
In short, by knowing the importance of optimizing the upload speed of your blog, you can implement actions on your website to avoid being penalized by search engines as well as reducing the bounce rate, which significantly impacts that you don’t get conversions like getting user data, product sales, etc. It is crucial as a blogger to consider that the upload speed is associated with good SEO.
I’m Alexios Papaioannou, an experienced affiliate marketer and content creator. With a decade of expertise, I excel in crafting engaging blog posts to boost your brand. My love for running fuels my creativity. Let’s create exceptional content together!
