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!

Why Secure Your Entire Site? When you view a webpage, that information passes through a dozen or more servers to get to you. If that URL starts with https://, anyone in the path can view or even modify the contents of the page. ISPs insert their own ads in web pages, can now legally track & sell your browsing history, and many governments around the world collect massive troves of browsing data. Securing your entire site (instead of just the checkout portion) is now considered a very good thing to do for your users. It's nearly impossible for a 'man in the middle' to extract or change information on secure pages. It's a win for the user. Here is a more detailed explanation of HTTP vs HTTPS (https://ahrefs.com/blog/http-vs-https-for-seo/) if you want more background.