Website speed optimization | Speed up website to improve search rankings

Google is using website loading speed as one of the basis for search engine rankings. This has been a part of google ranking algorithm and now Google is openly accepting that the faster the website the better it will be in ranking.

You may have heard that here at Google we're obsessed with speed, in our products and on the web. As part of that effort, today we're including a new signal in our search ranking algorithms: site speed. Site speed reflects how quickly a website responds to web requests. (Source: Google Blog)

The website loading speed does not only improve the ranking of the website but also enhances user experience of the website. You will have more happy users who spend a lot of time if your website is faster because speed does matters, when site responds slowly the website the users will spend lesser time and won't be content with the experience.
If your page loading speed is more than 3sec then you are losing almost 50% of your audience. On mobiles the same pages take more than 3sec to load and much of the audience without waiting for the content, however much it is good, will leave and go for a faster loading website.
What may be the best way to boost page's conversion rate may not have anything to do with changing the headline or colors of the buttons but rather its is delivering a faster user experience (improvment in the loading speed). More than 70% of online shoppers are not willing to visit e-commerce store that is slow to load. And most of them will also give poor experience reviews to their friends and recommend to not use the website.
Optimizing the website speed not only improves the user experience but also aides in decreasing operating costs. While determining speed factor during ranking the Google algorithm compares competing websites loading time relative to each other.
To improve speed the first thing to do is to analyze what is causing the speed to slow down. Following are some free tools that will enable you to analyze speed of your website and discloses the main factors of  speed-down in your website.

1. PageSpeed Insights - Google

PageSpeed Insights by Google is a free tool for web developer and admins to check the performance of their websites and see the factors that are effecting the speed and becoming cause of speed down. It is easy-to-use tool to find if your website is speed is what it should be. The PageSpeed Insights gives points, to each main factor affection your site out of 100, to quantify your webpage's performance. The higher the points the better the speed will be.

2. GTmetrix

GTmetrix is a free of cost and easy-to-use loading speed evaluation tool for webmasters and developers. It not only provides you with the evaluation of the loading speed but will also provide you with the recommendations on how to improve in the places which are causing the speed loss. On this tool you can select different countries and browsers to test the loading speed from and it will use its respective server for evaluation. You can also compare different web urls and see all the metrics where one is better than the other and vice versa.

Loading speed is not the only factor but one of the many factors that effect search engine rankings for Google searches. But it will have a considerable effect in the overall results of the search rankings.