Different tips exist to improve the natural referencing of a page or a site. We find classic techniques such as HTML optimization, canonical tags, or the configuration of the robots.txt file. Another solution, about which little is said, but which nevertheless remains effective, consists in optimizing the loading time.

Optimization of loading time: an important lever for natural referencing

The crawlers of search engines regularly crawl your site to find new content. It is clear that the loading speed of the page has a considerable influence on the quality of the crawl. Indeed, the longer the site takes to display, the less content the crawler has to “eat”. However, less indexed content means less efficient natural referencing.

Thus, optimizing the loading time will help improve the number of pages crawled by robots. And, finally, gain some places in the SERPs.

The reduced display time for user experience

But what then is the ideal loading time? Nearly one in two Internet users (47%) believe that a site should be displayed in less than 3 seconds.

The days of minutes and 56kbps modems seem to be over. Today, with the democratization of broadband, Internet users have never been so rushed and demanding in terms of user experience. This is why since February 2017, Google’s new bot, called Phantom 5, has also taken visitors’ behavior into account. This update now requires companies to compete in efforts to optimize their site and make it efficient.

In addition to being extremely frustrating for your visitors, these latencies will also negatively impact many of your KPIs: session length, number of pages visited, bounce rate, etc. To give you an idea, know that a second of loading more equals 11% less conversion.

This degradation will then be considered by Google as a lack of credibility of the site. Which will then be relegated by several in the search results.

The levers to operate to improve the performance of your site

Several levers can be operated for site optimization. These include, among others:

  • Browser performance;
  • Page elements;
  • JS errors;
  • Technical performance;
  • Browsing contexts for Internet users.