The time it takes to load a web page is called the page download speed, or load time. Your site's average load time is an important factor in Google's site ranking algorithm. Web users expect pages to load quickly, and pages with longer load times tend to have higher bounce rates, and those sites are seen as less important. For more information on the effect of site performance and organic rankings and conversion, see Cloudflares article on Website Performance and Conversation Rates (https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/performance/more/website-performance-conversion-rates/).

To measure site speed, Google released a SEO tool called Lighthouse back in 2018 that offers some insight on the performance of your website and its pages. This audit gives a mobile and desktop score across four areas: Performance, Accessibility, Best Practices, and SEO. For the sake of this article, we will be focusing on solely the "Performance" category of the testing and its associated fixes. So, let's dive in!