How Does Page Speed Affect My Site Rankings?

How does page speed affect my site’s ranking?

Hey everyone, it’s Jason Hennessey from Everspark Interactive. Today, I’m going to talk about something that recently came up at the SMX Advanced conference in Seattle: page speed. So, we’ve known for over a year that Google considers site speed a factor in deciding rankings, but now we can see the effects of this consideration. At the conference, it was noted that, whereas page size wasn’t found to have a noticeable correlation to ranking well, page load time definitely has a strong correlation to where your site lies in the SERPs. Let’s tackle two questions: How can I check my page speed, and why is it so important?

I think we can all agree that when we stumble upon a website that takes twenty minutes to load, we pull our hair out a little in frustration, and then make the decision not stay on the site as it takes its sweet time. We click out of the frustrating site and find another one that loads right away. Doesn’t it make sense that the less frustrating website would rank higher on the SERPs than the one that makes you want to pull your hair out? It makes sense to us, and it clearly makes sense to Google.

If you already know that your site is slower than you’d like it to be, the first thing to do is make sure that you don’t have too many images or videos on your homepage. These can slow down the loading process significantly. While you might think photos and videos would improve user experience once your page loads, chances are the majority of users won’t stick around to see what your page has to offer. We live in an internet driven, fast-paced world where we are used to getting to different sites quickly, and there is just no place for slow sites in the top rankings anymore. If you don’t have very many images or videos, it might be a hosting issue.

So, if you aren’t quite sure about how fast your page loads, then the next thing to do is find out. How can you check your page’s speed? Google has a tool just for this purpose called the page speed tool. That’s simple enough, right? Just go to pagespeed.googlelabs.com to access it and begin improving your site!

You may be wondering why page speed is so important for SEO. The number one reason for this is that Google highly values the user experience. With technology continuously advancing, we all want to be able to grab our computers and find what we are looking for immediately. Your site’s visitors, then, will be much happier if they can quickly visit and find what they are looking for.

A faster site will also give the Google crawlers more frequent access to your site, which will maintain or even improve your site’s ranking. After the Panda update and the increasing importance of content, it can’t hurt to make sure that your blog also loads quickly.
Our best advice would be to keep your site simple, yet professional. The simplicity will make it load quickly and the professionalism will make your visitors and Google happy. The search engine has recently admitted that one of its goals is to make the web faster overall. Make your contribution to a faster internet and optimize your site for Google and your users.

If you have any questions about improving your page’s speed or about what Google considers important, please visit our blog. We update it daily with important news from the search engines and from the major players in SEO. Thanks for watching, we’ll see you next time!