Website and page load speed will affect Google rankings, just not as much as links, good titles & content that matches a search engine visitors intent.
Do I even need to add anything? A fast host could be argued to be a prerequisite in 2010, and a fast site too, if your web designer has any clue.
I’m asked quite a lot these days about server speed and Google rankings. I’d imagine it is already part of the algorithm on some VERY minute level (why not?) and probably is going to be turned up a notch in 2010, but small differentials in page speed load will be clearly NOT as important as just about every other onsite seo factor and even more important external factors which encourages Google to rank your site higher.
If your server is dog*&^% and your website takes minutes to load it’s a bad user experience (why SEO have always advised don’t use crap free hosting) and your site probably doesn’t deserve to get high Google rankings even as it stands.
EDIT – In 2013 – be careful. If your site is unavailable for a period of time, your rankings suffer much faster, and sometimes take longer to recover (from experience).
Website & Page Load Speed Tests & Tools
- Pingdom Page Load Test tool
- Website Optimization Speed Test Tool
- Uptrends Page Load Test Tool
- Submit Plus Page Load Test
- Link Vendor Page Load Test tool
- Compare Yours & Competitors Page speed
- Tools to speed up your site (defo worth a read)
… and you always have Page Speed by Google (extension for Firefox browser)
Shout out to Mani @ Daily SEO Blog for some of those tools (I’ll add more later)
For what it’s worth Shaun I know a woman who is married to someone on the search quality team and she says all he has been working on for the past month or two is page speed stuff.
Hi Andrew cheers for the info :) The spammers will be getting those page speed times down to 10K in no time at all too. I’m not arguing it’s importance, just it’s relevant importance in the grand scheme of things. But if Google wants to make the web faster, I’m all for it. Thanks for dropping by Andrew :)
Could have implications for CMS’ like Joomla with 20 external css & js files to load…
I doubt Google will take this to the extreme. If it doesn’t improve their search results, it won’t improve the user experience, so it won’t make them money. I wonder how much of it is posturing to get Web masters to make faster sites. Sure, if you site is dog slow, they may penalize you. But I doubt it will make a difference whether your site loads in 0.5 seconds or 1 second. What it probably will affect is crawl rate. Google only has a certain amount of time for each site. If your pages load slower, less of them will be re-indexed before Google moves on. So your results may not be as fresh and that’s where I think the biggest penalty will kick in. Also, don’t forget about Yahoo’s YSlow tool. -Kerberos
For what it’s worth I’ve been struggling with memory problems lately in my .Net website which have been causing my site to run slowly and my traffic from Google has definitely been hit although only slightly, but it makes sense, slow page loads make for a bad user experience and fall into the pattern for inclusion in the algorithm
For a $100 tip on Mahalo Jason Calacanis gained a lot of very good advice on how to improve load time. http://www.mahalo.com/answers/web-development/how-would-you-make-mahalos-pages-load-faster I also wouldn’t use Pingdom as a metric, but check in webmaster tools for page load time when Google caches site.
Cool Andy
Agreed! The way people have been talking, it’s as if you all need to upgrade your server to get decent traffic. Fact is that if your website is total crap but on a fast server, it’s not going to make a jot of difference! It’ll still be crap and pretty much ignored by Google!
Yes, working on my new site design, as well as making speed my number one priority. Using Amazon’s S3 service as well. Noticed every time I highlight something on your site, it sends out a request to tnty.com. Very cool. I wasn’t coping anything, just an OCD habit I have when reading… :~)
Jim it’s pretty cool eh? Free too.
Like you Shaun, I rather felt that that page speed was already being used to some small degree. All those times that the serps change unexpectedly and then change back a couple of days later, IMO that’s often them testing things like this to see what the effects are. Now when I’m watching slow pages load what’s usually the biggest culprit? (apart from the GA server of course ;-) ) In my experience it’s ad servers. So if you aren’t getting much income from an ad and it tends to be slow then I’d consider ditching it. While if your primary focus is ecommerce I’d consider ditching ads altogether. After proper analysis of course.
So how fast should the loading time for your pages be? Granted that you have a fast host/server, many people still have lousy connections so it’s still gonna load slow on their end. Google bots on the other hand, I’m sure, doesn’t have this problem.
Good question. You can use all the tools but in the end it is how fast Google thinks your website is loading. ;) Oh, you can only get that by giving your details and data to Google.
[...] Google really likes it when you do things for users. Shaun Anderson did a great job summarizing the importance of page load speed [...]
I see a few of my sites get slower at different times of day , An educated guess would be that it’s my connection. The question arises, will google penalise sites that are slow due to heavy network traffic while it’s crawling. Even the fastest cars are still effected by bad traffic.
Really glad this has been introduced, as it encourages people to write more compact adn fast loading websites. Decided to compress all my css and js on my wordpress blog – saved loads in file size.