On-Page SEO Speed Audit

What’s a Good Website Load Time? 

A lot has changed since the early days of the internet. Customers now expect almost instant loading times on both desktop and mobile. In fact, the majority of people will click away from a website if it takes more than three seconds to load, and most expect even faster times on mobile devices.  

In fact, Google research indicates that the chances of a searcher navigating away from any given part of your website (called a “bounce”) increase by 32% if the page load speed increases from one second to three seconds. That likelihood increases by 90% if the page speed goes from three to five seconds. In other words, if your website is taking more than a second or two to load, you are definitely losing customers.

But just how many? And what’s causing the slow load times? That’s exactly what a free website speed performance audit can help you determine.

Bounce Rate 

The number of customers who leave your website after only viewing one page is called your “bounce rate.” One main goal of effective web design is ensuring that potential customers spend a lot of time on your site, viewing many different pages. The longer they interact with your website, the more likely they are to make a purchase. 

This makes bounce rate one of the key web performance metrics available to you. It shows you whether or not your website is interesting and accessible to potential customers or if it’s causing them frustration and sending them to your competitors. 

Your Web Page Is Your Most Valuable Marketing Tool

The online and real-world marketplaces are more interwoven than ever. An effective website strategy recognizes that potential customers have access to the internet at almost all times and use it to find essential products and services. 

Your website is the home base for your business. At the bare minimum, it should provide essential information about your business, like hours, location, pricing, and customer reviews. Since your website is the main way customers learn about your business, it’s vital that it loads quickly, is attractively designed, and communicates a coherent brand that helps customers experience your website in a positive way. 

Need more than just a speed audit? Our full-service digital marketing agency can handle a wide variety of optimization services to ensure your site performs the way you want. From fixing your meta tags and broken links to a complete website redesign, our digital marketing team helps you turn your website into an experience that will attract more customers.  

This is even more important for e-commerce sites, which count on customers being able to easily navigate through a vast catalog of individual products. Imagine counting slowly to five while you wait for a product photo of a shirt you clicked on to finally load the entire product page. Once it loads, you quickly realize it’s not the style you’re looking for, so you click “back” and have to wait another five long seconds to go back to your list of results. You probably won’t spend very much time browsing that e-commerce site. 

The goal of a website is to make it easy for customers to find your business and purchase from you. One of the main purposes of conducting a website audit for page speed is to ensure that customers can easily navigate around your page, leading to increased revenue for the website owners. 

Our Speed Audit Process

When you request an on-page SEO speed audit from SEO Design Chicago, here are the steps that our team will follow.

Don’t worry — you have the option to customize your choices at any stage. 

Select Pages to Audit

Depending on your budget, our team will choose a representative sample of pages to audit, or we may suggest auditing your entire website. For most sites, a sampling of different kinds of pages can give us a good view of what you need for overall website optimization. This usually includes your home page, a service page, a few different product listings or blogs, and a topic hub.

Technical Audit

Next, we will use a variety of industry-standard SEO tools to identify technical problems with your website’s code. These may include Google PageSpeed Insights, GTmetrix, Pingdom tools, and our proprietary suite of tools. We can see averages of load times, key performance dips, and other trends.

HTML Source Code Analysis 

This service sets our audit apart. Most free website speed tests do not include an in-depth analysis of the root causes of your site’s problems. When we conduct the audit, we check for HTML tags, duplicate titles and headers, duplicate analysis and third-party scripts, multiple jQuery libraries, and large inline styles and scripts. This is all part of our technical SEO analysis, which ensures the back end of your website is performing adequately. 

Analyze Response Headers 

The internet works through a series of send-and-receive responses between the client and the server. The URL that you see at the top of your page contains “response headers,” which are sent by servers and contain a variety of instructions. 

We can check the response headers that your website sends out to clients to determine if any of them are sending unnecessary instructions that slow down the processing of information.  

Check Mobile Speed

Customers expect even faster load speeds on their mobile devices. Our audit helps you understand how well your site is loading on smartphones and tablets and how that could be affecting your overall bounce rate and revenue. 

Create a Customized Report and Recommendations

One of the main benefits of a custom website audit is a detailed report about what we found and what to do about it. After we have checked all relevant factors, our team will create a personalized report that provides specific examples of how you can enhance your site experience for both search engines and users. 

Review Your Report with You 

One of our SEO specialists will meet with you to explain the results of your report and help you decide on the next steps. You can decide to implement our recommendations on your own, or you can hire our full-service digital marketing agency to handle your website updates for you. All of our work is custom-quoted.