March 2

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Don’t Just Check the Site Speed of your Home Page

By Jason Khoo

March 2, 2021


Transcript

Hi guys. And welcome to another edition of Zupo's SEO Talk & Tea. 

Today's conversation is don't just check the site speed of your homepage. This is a really important conversation because you'd be surprised how many people do this. And so the reason why this is important is site speed has become, over the years, a more and more important part of Google ranking factors. And saying that, a lot of people are very focused on it, as you should be. But what I think what was happening is a lot of people only check their homepage, which can be an issue at times. But before we begin, real quick, I just wanted to introduce the tea we have today, because this is Zupo's SEO Talk & Tea. Today we have a jasmine green tea that I'm going to start brewing right now. Jasmine green tea is a very... You'll find this in a lot of boba shops. If you've ever been to a boba shop and ordered green tea, it's probably a jasmine green tea.

So this is a very floral smelling, a very light kind of tea that I like to drink, especially on a hotter day. But I'm sure you guys are interested in site speed so let's get started talking about site speed. There are a lot of free tools out there and I don't really ever remember all their names, but the big one is like Google lighthouse or Google PageSpeed tools. Those two are super the predominant Google ones, but I think there's other ones that people also use when measuring site speed. But something that's very important is a lot of people, when they measured their site speed, they just check the homepage. And that's very understandable because when you're using these free tools, it has just that one search bar and you just plug into your website.

And a lot of people, I think they don't do this consciously or anything, but they're just moving so quickly that they don't check anything else. And so usually when someone's shuffling their homepage, they see the score and they think, "Oh yeah, this is how fast my site is." But that's where the flaw is. That is how fast the page of your site is, and that happens to be your homepage. Sometimes, and oftentimes this is the case, how a website is designed changes from page to page. The homepage has its own style. The product pages, the service pages have their own style. It's pretty obvious that all pages are made a little bit different. So saying that, you need to measure pages beyond your homepage. And so you can do this manually by copying and pasting your URLs into the page speed tool.

There are some tools that we have found online that can do a little bit more of a bulk page speed, where you can put in many. I believe these are more freemium tools. And there are other paid tools like Screaming Frog that you can use that have a bulk page speed insights kind of function, where unfortunately, if you're looking for free tools, Screaming Frog is a paid tool. We have it at Zupo. You can plug in an entire website and get all the page speed scores measured. Now, I'm not going to talk too heavily about finding the tools. There was a tool we used to use that was free, that we found through a blog post. But since then we haven't been able to get it to work. So I'll leave the discovery of these tools for another time. But what I want to talk about is just reaffirming why this is so important.

And another reason why this is so important is that yes, your homepage, you want to check your site speed, but a lot of times for your SEO campaigns, it's not your homepage you're trying to ranking. A lot of times, it's your service page, blog posts, guide pages. These are the pages that we want to start ranking for, right? And if we're never checking the site speed or the page speed of those pages, how do you know if it's going to perform against your competitors? Because again, your homepage might be fast, but your other pages may not. So saying that, what you want to do is at the very minimum, if you are trying to rank a URL or a page, get that page checked. Again, not just the homepage, it's the page itself, right?

So therefore you don't really necessarily need to measure the whole site. You just need to measure the pages that are associated with you trying to rank on the first page. Those other ones, while it's still important to get those site speeds up, it's not always integral. Again, if we're trying to prioritize the 80/20 rule, just go with the pages that you're trying to rank. And then again, you can use the Google PageSpeed tools that are free online, therefore you'll need a bulk checker. You can go at it in many various ways, but this video is just kind of meant to be a healthy reminder. I think a lot of people know to check the whole site, but they end up only checking the homepage. All right. So hopefully that reminder will help you guys in your own SEO campaigns. I'm going to go ahead and pour out my tea. If you guys enjoyed the video, please like and subscribe, and I hope to see you guys again soon.

Thanks everybody.

Jason Khoo

About the author

Jason is founder and CEO of Zupo, which is an Orange County based SEO consulting agency helping construct powerful long term SEO strategies for our clients. Jason also enjoys multiple cups of tea a day, hiding away on weekends catching up on reading and rewatching The Simpsons for the 20th time.

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