Site Speed: What Does It Mean for SEO?
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Jaamit
3 years ago -
7138
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On Friday Google made official the news that Matt Cutts had mentioned last year, that website page load times were going to become one of the 200+ factors in Google’s ranking algorithms. This is a pretty unusual move from Google – usually (and for obvious reasons) they don’t exactly publicise ranking factors in this way. Since it’s a pretty headline worthy move, I think it’s important to keep a sense of perspective for what this means for website owners and SEOs. Below are a few observations that hopefully make the news a bit clearer.
1. This is Good News for the web. Slow sites are shite. Everyone hates them. Mice, keyboards and the occasional monitor worldwide have felt the wrath caused by them. The fact that Google have taken such a public step of saying it’s ‘part of their ranking algorithm’ means webmasters will sit up and take notice, and start thinking about the fact that their 8.9 second load time just might be a problem. Basically it is a good kick up the arse for site owners, and a good justification to your boss/manager to sign off on some budget to clean up some code on your site. Google have a lot of power over web development practices, and they are using this to maximum effect in their quest to make the web faster.
2. Google want to reduce load on their own servers. This has always been a factor for SEO – that’s why eliminating duplicate content is good for SEO – if you reduce unnecessary server load for Google, in a sense they reward you with spending more of your crawl budget on your ‘money pages’. In the era of Caffeine and an internet that is growing at an exponential rate, can you imagine the efficiency savings Google could achieve if 50% of websites cleaned up their code a bit?
3. Repeat after me. I still need good content and links. Note that Matt Cutts says site speed is only going to be a factor in 1% of cases – i.e. extreme situations. If you’ve got the best site and the strongest links then a bit of a sluggish server will probably not harm you too much. Conversely this announcement most certainly does not mean that if you strip your homepage down to 3 lines of text with no images, CSS or Javascript or rich media elements so it now only loads in 0.01 seconds then it will suddenly climb up the SERPs! Although you’re more than welcome to try – less competition for the rest of us SEOs! ;) Oh and the first person who starts talking about a “site speed penalty” will get a slap in the face with a wet fish of their choice.
4. Anyone for Chrome? It’s not too far a leap from Google search team’s focus on site speed, and the Google Chrome browser, which is undoubtedly a bloody fast browsing experience. If Search puts a spotlight on sites loading quickly then surely that opens the door wider for people to be interested in switching to Chrome? Tenuous maybe but in my view getting more people to use their browser is all part of Google’s master plan to learn everything about you, your browsing habits and how likely you are to click on one of their sweet, tasty, golden sponsored links and help the poor startup turn over a few bob for a change.
5. You should have been worried about site speed already! The much bigger reason to improve site speed? It leads to more sales/conversions! People drop off when they have to wait for a page to load. That’s why you should be doing it anyway, and if this news about it being officially part of the algorithm is what forces you into it, then so be it. I notice that Richard over at SEOgadget has put up an excellent post about the business impact of site speed which I strongly recommend checking out. For a short and sweet version I can’t put it much better than @tomcritchlow:
A final thought on how site speed might affect SEO practice. Should SEOs now start including site speed in their reports? I definitely think it should play a part, particularly during initial audits and annual reviews. But it’s the kind of thing that could easily become an obsession every month based on the false promise that it’ll improve your rankings “because Google said so”. In the vast majority of cases I suspect it won’t help you rank, although Joost De Valk says otherwise and you’ve gotta take him seriously. But it will give you all kinds of other good juju. Why not start with the tools Google has given you, like the site performance feature in Webmaster Tools, and the Page Speed extension for Firebug. Then, maybe head over to some well written guides on speeding up your load times. Then get back to making your site remarkable enough in the first place that its got the kinds of backlinks, rankings and traffic where page load speeds will actually make a difference.
Update: This post has now been submitted to Sphinn (thanks Nichola!) – if you enjoyed it why not give it a Sphinn…
19 comments so far to - Site Speed: What Does It Mean for SEO? -
Great post – nice to see someone else putting the speed thing into perspective
Interesting post, i use some page speed tools today on my Firefox.
What is the best way to test the speed of a site and what is the correct speed? Is it as quick as possible?
have a look at some of the links in the last paragraph ;)
regarding the “correct speed” there is no one answer to this as different types of sites (eg video/image rich vs text based) will have different thresholds. But I’ve seen the 2000ms (2s) benchmark thrown about and you’re doing well if you can get your pages to load close to this. Site Performance Google Webmaster Tools gives you a “FAST”, “MEDIUM” or “SLOW” indication based on average load times – a decent guide to go by I’d say.
Hi Jaamit
Nice post. It’s a shame that people will only take this on board now that it has been announced by Google. Anything that improves accessibility, will generally contribute positively to SEO and site speed has been banged on about for years and years!
Nikki Rae
As you alluded to above, site speed should really be one of the most defining factors with your website, not because of an SEO benefit, but because it’s helpful to users.
I wonder how much will be made of it though, personally I’d like to see something along the lines of when malware is spotted on your site, with a notice in Google WMT & maybe something appearing underneath the SERP in Google along the lines of “This website take a while to load”, I’d think that’d be more beneficial to users than a (however small) drop in SERPS.
**takes off tin foil hat :P**
Interesting idea Rhys! Well I can’t see that happening as a slow loading site isn’t exactly a threat like malware is, and it could undermine people being able to find the best/most relevant content just because it happens to sit on a dodgy server or contains a lot of messy code. However I do think Google are going as far as they can without setting up this type of flag – this move has got so much coverage, even though they have said it only affects 1% of sites! Eg look at the BBC’s coverage.
All of Google’s public statements have to be seen with a PR intention – they are trying to change web practices so they used the most powerful channel they have at their disposal – an announcement by the Search algo boffins. Even if it was utter fabrication that site speed affects rankings it wouldn’t matter; what matters is the affect their announcement has.
Jaamit,
Hi. Nice article – it makes sense for Google to add load times to their algorithm because it reflects usability research showing users giving up when loading slow pages. I know – I do it myself.
I’m a software developer – yesterday we added load speed to Linkstream SEO Web App because we think load times will become increasingly important for SEO.
For your interest, Linkstream shows this blog post took 6.3422 secs to load! Sorry to tell you but this is quite slow.
You can improve performance of this blog post by using external javascript libraries and using a CDN but that is probably the subject of another post ;-)
best,
Andrew Gill
Linkstream.co.uk – SEO Web App
Hey Andrew… oops you’ve got us there. Can I use the one about the cobbler’s son having no shoes and move on? ;) But seriously you’re right to point that out, it’s one of those things we’re aware of but never get round to sorting…
However I don’t think we will be penalised by Google for having that load time!
Good observations, nice post. Like most SEO efforts, improving page speed (where it needs improving) has a dual benefit for both SEO and users – this is the key point for me and as always, the best way to promote this type of activity to clients.
One other nice page speed tool is Pingdom, also part of the SEO Site Tools extension for Chrome and mentioned in Joost’s post – provides a nice breakdown of what page elements are loading at what times and at what stage in the load process (so not that much different to Page Speed, except that maybe it’s a bit clearer).
I think that these usability-type SEO elements, along with some others (custom 404s?) could be looked at more holistically in terms of overall site performance for SEO and should definitely be factored into initial and rolling site audit reports as you mentioned.
On your third point and saving crawl budget, what are your thoughts on the If-Modified-Since HTTP header? This was mentioned again in the recent interview with Matt Cutts, who originally promoted supporting this header over at Webmaster World. Perhaps this will now bumped up the priority list on site audit reports?
Interesting comment Jamie, thanks for stopping by. I haven’t played with If-Modified-Since headers so far, sounds like a smart thing to test when you’re talking about really large sites where there are pages you know are not going to change and you’d rather the crawlers spent their time elsewhere on your site. I do wonder what effect that would have on the internal links within those pages and how much juice they’d pass on. Would love to play around with them and see what it can achieve.
I hope people don’t get all freaked out and start stripping their websites down. Unfortunately some of those nice items used for user experience and conversions slow things down a bit.
Nice post Jaamit. I started my site speed tweaks last year when Joost De Valk talked about it at Think Visibility 2. Cache plugins for WordPress blogs and shrinking your images with PunyPNG (http://www.gracepointafterfive.com/punypng) were just 2 of the things I now do all the time. You might want to take a look at the article over at seomofo (http://www.seomofo.com/wordpress/comments-slow-page-speed.html) about Gravatars having a detrimental impact on load times as well.
Nice one Toby… I edited your links to make them clickable. PunyPNG looks very useful, would save me going into “save for web” in Photoshop. Saw seomofo’s post at the time but to be honest I feel features like gravatars and auto converting smileys are worth adding a bit of extra load time… ;)
I Hate using old slow sites, it drives me mad waiting for pages to load, I would go so far to say that it has cost some sites a sale if the page doesn’t load straight away as I will click off it and try another site.
Common sense article. So needed…
One thing about the point no. 2 – it implies that Google will limit your crawl budget if your page load speed is low. this is an interesting proposition and maybe it is true, however, according to what we know today, crawl budget is a function of offpage factors, mainly Pagerank, and authority.
Thanks Branko! You’re right to pick me up on point 2, we dont know that crawl budget is related to time spent crawling, but it is related to number of pages which I understand to be an issue of server load fundamentally. So yes pure speculation to say that crawl budget comes into the site speed issue, but my main point was that Google are trying to reduce load on their servers wherever possible and this is one of the ways.
Nice….
I love this post
This is totally true in regards to SEO and Online Marketing.
We had a wordpress blog with an outdated plugin that caused the page load time to throw our Google SERP positions right out……ahhh!