As noted in a spate of recent articles and blogposts, Google has finally decided to incorporate page load speed as a factor in determining both organic and paid-search results. I say “finally”, because you could almost hear a chorus of heavenly users – weary of uncomplicated pages taking half a minute to load, weary of having to wait for the last of 5 or 6 banner ads to be served before being able to even start reading the copy they came to read – singing, “It’s about time!!”
As Mike Moran notes in a recent post for Search Engine Guide, “It’s always been true that a slow-loading site can hurt your organic search results. Sites that load more slowly aren’t crawled as often or as deeply. The spider will spend only so much time on your site, so the faster it responds, the more pages get indexed.” Even more important, it’s also clearly true that a slow-loading site can cost you visitors: by some estimates, 40 percent of visitors will wait no more than three seconds for a Web page to load before abandoning a site.
But now, Google acknowledges that it is explicitly using page load speed as a ranking factor in organic search, and as an element of Quality Score in Adwords. It’s not a major factor, but hopefully enough to influence the behavior of at least the site owners who have already optimized for most of the more critical factors; and then over time, competitive pressure should tend to bring the others in line as well.
Your best friend won’t tell you, but…
How do you know how your site stacks up on the performance issue? Every Webmaster should be familiar with the knowledge available to them in Google Webmaster Tools …and for this purpose, its Site Performance option. In addition, a recent post by Arnold Zafra for Search Engine Journal provides links to a number of tools that can help you evaluate your site’s performance.
What to do
Of course, there are a host of factors that influence page-load speed, including:
- number/size/density of graphical elements
- number and responsiveness of externally-served elements (e.g., banner ads)
- shoddy or overly complex page coding, perhaps utilizing too much Javascript and Flash
- your (or your hosting firm’s) Web server responsiveness
Most of these are under your control to some extent (in fact all of them, given that you certainly can change hosting providers should their service remain for too long in the unacceptable range). Several of the tools listed in Arnold’s post provide suggestions for improvement along with their diagnosis. Most observers discourage any rush to focus on server responsiveness, because unless the other factors are pretty clean, it’s likely to be less than 10% of the problem.
What you shouldn’t do
Google’s comments leave the impression that site speed is still a relatively minor factor in its ranking algorithm …perhaps at the level of a tie-breaker between two pages that otherwise would be identically ranked. Clearly, that means that you needn’t rush to focus madly on improving your site’s speed unless/until all of those known critical factors are copasetic: compelling and relevant content, inbound links, keyword optimization …hey, you know the drill. If those are out of whack, you can decrease your page-load time to zero and probably not move the page-rank needle. If those are all good, then by all means go after site speed: you may just improve your rankings a touch …and you’ll definitely have a much happier visitor population. And happier visitors are generally better about rewarding you by buying stuff from your company.
