In my last article I talked about how we make our heavenly websites. One of the things that I talked about was having a “fast” website. I want to go into further detail about how we make fast web pages and why when it comes to building up conversion rate and having a search engine optimized website, speed is a critical factor. Speeding up your website is no easy task but with the correct tools you can diagnose your problems and be on your way to getting a score of 100%.

Page speed is a critical part of ranking high on Google’s search engine results. So your page speed affects your SEO directly in Google’s Algorithm. What is also important is that page speed can affect your rankings indirectly, by increasing the bounce rate of your customers and reducing their dwell time on your website. At Google, users come first. Studies by Google show that users leave sites after about 3 seconds if it takes too long to load. This means that their experience is bad and Google doesn’t like ranking sites which provide bad user experience. It’s not just Google that cares about user experience, but your customers as well. Your website should reflect the way you want to service your customers. Give your customers fast, efficient and fun service both in your store and online.

For example if you have a gym that is called “Wheelbarrow GYM” you don’t only want to appear in search results when people search for “gym wheelbarrow”. You want to appear when people search for “gym”, “price gym” or “gym college discount” because that’s when you get new customers. Then you are in competition with all the gyms in your area to appear on the first page. That’s where a fast website helps you to the top of the list and to convert customers.

We use tools like Google’s PageSpeed and Think with Google (there you can also calculate increased revenue from a faster webpage). There are a bunch of tools out there that can help and they all show similar results. The most typical things Google recommends are compressing images, using cache and minifying HTML or CSS code. All of these improve speed, but these tools also help you with other SEO things like adding the correct metadata and tags.

During the end of last year we tried many tools for building a website. We mostly work with React and found our true love in GatbyJS. Gatsby is a React-based, GraphQL powered, static site generator. That means that it knits together the best parts of React which is a JavaScript library maintained by Facebook. With GatsbyJS you become future proof and can connect to any CMS, API or database you want. GatsbyJS also generates Progressive Web Apps. At Bonsai we have been using React since it’s release in 2013. We have great experience with many different React frameworks and love the challenge of scoring as high as possible with our websites. One of our next objective is to change our own website to use GatsbyJS since we want to have it in the top 1%.