You know that web page load speed can affect your search engine rankings right?
We spend a lot of time optimizing our content and thinking about the keywords we want to use to attract those illusive customers, but how often do we look past the obvious – website page load speeds.
On a basic level have a think about your own browsing habits. If you are searching for a solution or an answer, you click a link and all you get is a white screen and your web browsing telling you it is waiting for content, how long do you wait around? It is the same with search engines and how they manage some of the metrics that make up your keyword rankings.
Here are a few things that Google (as an example) looks for when checking out your site.
- Google utilizes a multitude of different factors in order to monitor and track your site and its content. Basically, these factors are connected to the web page’s content, including its headers, titles, URL, text and textual context and more. They measure their factors because these things serve as measurements of website’s authenticity.
- In 2010, Google announced that website speed would have an impact on search engine ranking. Google did it for the first time. Today, the web page load speeds at which a person could view your website’s content from a search engine result are a factor on determining its search engine ranking. If you want to check your sites performance out, why not have a look here – https://developers.google.com/speed/
- Google also announced that mobile sites with slow web page load speed would soon be penalized in terms of search engine rankings. According to Google, a low and poor performing website does not give satisfying browsing experience to users. As a result, they don’t deserve good promotion in search results. It clearly shows that web page speeds can greatly affect search engine ranking of websites.
However, it seems that Google intentionally make things vague especially regarding how exactly webpage load speed affect search rankings. They did not release clear statements regarding this particular aspect that talks about page speed impacts to search engine rankings. But, Google clearly said relevancy of website content is a great factor on how they determine webpage load speed. So, it is therefore concluded that there’s a correlation between search engine rankings and website speed metrics. Determining and classification of outright relation between these two things are still unclear but it safe to say that content, worth, suitability and importance of website content play vital role in terms of maintaining good search engine rankings.
My personal take on all of this is really that it is a holistic approach that will work for. Don’t concentrate on just a single aspect of your Search Engine Optimization, make sure you review all of the components and functions that that make up your website, as this will be the only way to make sure you have all the bases covered. There are no hard and fast rules, but remember content is king and people don’t hang around to read it, if it takes ages to load, so give them what they want !