Can reducing page size impact seo?

Question

We have e-commerce website where we list all the products on our infinite scroll search page. The user can filter/sort these products.

Currently, we are fetching 20 products on mobile and 25 products in desktop on each page request and fetch others as the user scroll down. We wanted to optimize the performance and we thought of reducing the page size on page load i.e. load only 5 products on page load and if user scrolls down then fetch 10, if he still scrolls till bottom, fetch another 20 products and so on.

But I am worried that google bot will see only 5 product instead of 20 product? But we have put rel next and prev to indicate linkages in these pages.

What could be best approach to solve this:

1. Reduce page size and fetch more products only if user scrolls down.
2. Reduce page size and lazy load more products after few seconds. Would it help in seo ranking?

Answer 1

You could approach this from 2 angles.

1. SEO: make sure you have high quality keywords (long tail ones may help you appear higher in search results) on all pages. Make sure your images have alt text with an appropriate keyword in it, as well as titles that have some bearing on the image. Boots_women143.jpg is better for SEO than K84639t.jpg. Complete a good meta-description for each page. Your page titles need to contain the keyword for that page. All of these will improve your SEO.

2. In terms of optimizing performance: optimize your images, use responsive images to improve loading on any platform. Ensure your images are of high enough quality while not wasting bandwidth. Be able to load an image of appropriate size and quality for the browser/device/bandwidth combination of the user. I think the lazy loading is a good idea. And depending on how your site is formatted, perhaps you could load thumbnails in the infinite scroll and save larger images for the product page.