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Those looking to boost website SEO rankings have been known to focus on adding the right keywords and up-keeping content strategies. While this is correct, an overlooked element here is website speed.
No one wants to visit a website that lags and keeps the user waiting for it to load. In today’s day and age, the milestone for browsing is to be instantaneous as even a few seconds of wait time can make you lose engagement. According to Google, a single-second delay reduces conversion rates by 7%. For high-traffic websites like online gaming and e-commerce where every action is changing and requires quick processing, the presence of a high-speed website is much needed.
If you are a web developer, website owner, or hosting professional, let’s take a closer look at this concept and learn how to optimize your websites, ensuring a good user experience and improved SEO ranking.
Why Fast Loading Speeds Matter for Online Gaming Websites?
Gaming worldwide is worth $27.97 billion and has become an action-packed phenomenon. Billions of players are engaged in the enthralling journey of gaming and it has turned itself into something way bigger than just a hobby.
With such intense traffic towards these websites, the industry can’t thrive without a problem-free and immersive experience. Speed and performance are of course crucial factors in maintaining such an experience for the users, especially when we talk about gambling that can be intense if players are in a session of a highly demanded strategic game.
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Let’s take the example of poker online. It is one of the highest traffic-attracting websites in the gaming industry as it engages players in money-earning games and casual tournaments. With a continuous influx of players placing bets and joining tables in real time, the need for fast loading speed is undeniable.
Players need updates every second to move ahead in poker with activities like card distribution and placing bets. Delays in processing may cause discrepancies in several aspects of the game. This may lead to unfair results and ruin the gamer’s online experience. Although it’s not entirely true for poker, a faster website speed in other popular games is also required for the heavily loaded graphics used, requiring server-side efficiency.
Many users play on their phones. Slow loading can frustrate the user and cause them to drop off decreasing user retention. Also, as established in the intro, even Google prioritizes websites with a faster loading speed on the search engine giving them an advantage over competitors.
Technical Factors Influencing Website Speed
If you want your website to load quicker for SEO reasons, you need to be aware of the technical workings that affect it.
For starters, the performance of the server needs to be checked, and assigning a dedicated one for your website will ensure it has adequate resources to function. These include computational power and RAM which directly tie to the speed and reliability of the site.
Another important factor to consider is a faster page load speed. Metrics like First Input Delay (FID) and Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) are used by Google for the page load speed evaluation, further emphasizing its importance. If the page load speed is faster that affects the SEO rating positively as bounce rates are reduced as a result.
Additionally, consider a mobile version of your website as this will help with increasing search engine rankings and user engagement. This is because over half of the global web traffic comes from mobile users and optimization in this sector has become necessary for an overall boost.
Practical Tips for Optimizing Website Speed
For starters, enable browser caching to locally store static files so that users won’t need to reload them on each visit. A simple tip is to compress images with tools like TinyPNG. This will reduce the size of the picture without compromising the quality and increase the loading speed in return. Similarly, Gzip compression can also be used to shrink file sizes.
Website builders can also combine CSS and Javascript files to reduce the HTTP requests, increasing the loading speed. Moreover, CDN can be used to distribute the content across multiple servers globally, ensuring faster access in different locations by users.
How to Maintain Your Website Speed?
It’ll require a planned approach to ensure your website maintains its speed, especially at those peak levels when users are rushing to the page. Luckily, there are tools designed to ease this aspect with mainly Google’s PageSpeed Insight and WebPageTest being used. These help you keep an eye on the performance of your website like how long it takes to load and web vitals. Using the information gained through them, you can identify points where the webpage is lacking which lays further grounds for improvement.
Ensuring this consistent monitoring and optimization helps businesses stay stable and progress forward with ease. By detecting any performance issues ahead of time and getting them fixed by regular checkups, the user experience and SEO rankings will stay positive.
To sum up, website speed is not just a technical necessity but a strategic business move as well. With the world shifting online, speed is what will take you ahead, increase click rates, reduce bounce rates, and rank your online presence at the top of every search engine.
