Since the beginning Google has been trying to return the most relevant websites to its users. In the spring of 2010 Google announced that it would take a websites’ speed into consideration when calculating its search rankings for websites. Google took the decision that faster loading websites deliver an improved user experience over slower sites.
So how much does page load time impact my websites’ ranking?
Google has stated, more than once, that the additional page load factor in its algorithm affects less than 1% of search queries. So does this mean you shouldn’t worry about the speed of your website? Well think of it this way, if you have two websites with very similar content (a rival or competitor) with one website being very much faster than the other than which one would you think offers a better user experience?
Make no mistake though, if your website contains superior content to that of your competition this will outweigh most differences between page load times in your favour.
So site speed probably isn’t something to get too hung up on. But if your website is considerably slower than your competition then common sense says you should try speeding your site up to avoid users becoming frustrated and choosing the competition over you.
So what makes website slow?
Hosting.
The actual server that dishes out your website files is the biggest factor in website speed. If you are using very cheap or free hosting then you’ll be sharing server space with hundreds of other websites. This isn’t a problem if the server is up to the task of course, but there’s a lot of hosting companies out there that really need to either update their hardware – or host fewer websites on each server.
Hosting location. If all your customers are in the UK then it makes sense to host your website on a server located in UK. The closer you are to your websites’ server the faster it will respond to queries.
Website construction.
Back a few years’ websites were essentially just a collection of flat html files, content management systems were few and far between so websites were often a lot simpler. Websites were looked after by webmasters who handled any editing and image work. Today most people need to be able to update their own websites – and they want to be able to do it without learning any special web stuff. This means that todays’ websites are a lot more complicated than those of 5 years ago and place greater demands on the servers hosting them.
Website contents.
Images are often the largest files on your website. Anything you can do to reduce the size of your images will directly reduce the time it takes for them to appear to your visitors. Thankfully this is a pretty simple task that’s easily learnt.
A little bit on the side.
If your website is displaying RSS feeds from other websites, facebook updates, your latest tweets etc., these can all slow down your website whilst it collects the information it needs from these websites. Whilst it’s tempting to add yet another widget or extra little bit of code to display the current weather in Madrid think about whether your website needs it – and more importantly if it adds anything to the user experience.
