Does Speed Impact Your Website Rankings? And What You Need To Do To Reduce the Loading Time

In 2010, Google announced the speed as one of the ranking factors. With that, the sites which load slowly will see a drop in the rankings. Ideal load time is considered 3 seconds or less, but on an average, e-commerce sites take 7 seconds to load, which impact the user experience.

User experience such as the value a website provides for users is a crucial factor that Google and other search engines pay big importance to while ranking the website. A poor, invaluable UX experience not only affects the rankings of a site but also costs you a loss in revenue.

Studies show that visitors leave upright a website that takes too much time to load. Also, this creates a negative image of your brand. And the next time they won’t click on your website as they search for products and services relevant to you. So even if your website ranks on the first page of the search results, you won’t get the traffic as people are no longer interested in visiting your website.

Also, Google now penalizes the sites loading slow or taking too much time to load. And this will impact your site rankings, on both mobile and desktop devices.

Google says: “A search result for a resource having a short load time relative to resources having longer load times can be promoted in a presentation order, and search results for the resources having longer load times can be demoted.”

Whether you work with an agency providing SEO services or a webmaster catering to the need of SEO for businesses, you must understand that website speed and page speed are not the same.

So What Is Page Speed?

In fact, page speed is the time that a particular page takes to load. For example, your website takes 6 seconds to load, but a certain page from your website takes more than 6 seconds. The time a page takes to load is its real speed, not the time your website takes.

This means you won’t get the real benefits if the pages that use your target keywords load slower despite your website loading fast. 

So it is crucial that not just your website, but all the important pages that speak volume about your brand should load fast.

You can evaluate your page speed using Google's PageSpeed Insights that incorporate data from Chrome User Experience Report and reports on two important speed metrics: First Contentful Paint (FCP) and DOMContentLoaded (DCL).

Google Speed Update for Mobile Search

Last year, Google announced a speed update for mobile search.  Now the search engine will use mobile page speed as a ranking in their mobile search results.

But this is not going to impact all queries. According to Google, it will impact a small percentage of queries. This means if your mobile site is a little slow, you are still to appear in the search result pages. Only the slowest sites will suffer the drop in ranking.

You can use the new updated page speed report and tools such as Lighthouse to test the page speed and take the right course of actions towards for improving the speed.

To help you further, let us have a look at what Google Google’s Zhiheng Wang and Doantam Phan have to say.

“The “Speed Update,” as we’re calling it, will only affect pages that deliver the slowest experience to users and will only affect a small percentage of queries. It applies the same standard to all pages, regardless of the technology used to build the page. The intent of the search query is still a very strong signal, so a slow page may still rank highly if it has great, relevant content.”

This means if you have great content on your pages, an effort to rack up the speed will pay off hugely.

But there is a problem for small sites. PageSpeed Insights report uses data only from the Chrome Browser, and so it does not have enough data to precisely measure the sites. And you do not get all the details about real speed from the report.

Though the report gives optimization scores, that’s not enough to decide if a website has slow pages or not.

Actually, there are some parameters or say attributes that Google use to compare your site with your competitors. These are attributes that impact the load speed of your website.

What Are Factors That Sluggish a Page Speed

The factors that may impact the speed of your website may be too many. However, there are some most crucial ones that have a major impact on site speed.

•    Hosting service your use

•    Larger files, which take more time load

•    External embedded media such as videos that significantly lower the speed

•    Non-optimized browser or plug-ins and apps

•    Too many ads, particularly video ads that hugely impact a site speed

•    Visually rich design affects loading speed of a page

•    Widgets, for example, some social buttons, comment areas also have an adverse impact on page speed

•    Double-barreled code like insufficient HTML/CSS will lower the speed

How to Improve Site Speed: Steps You Need To Take

Do everything you can as to increase the speed of your website. Try to work on the factors that impact speed. But make sure it does not impact the relevancy of your site for users.

These are some most important things that you should do in order to increase your website loading speed.

•    Choose a reliable hosting service

•    Reduce the files size as much as possible

•    Use as fewer videos as possible. Make sure you to use only the videos that are most relevant and keep it short and insightful

•    Allow only high-value ads to show on your website. Do not litter your site with too many ads that kill the site loading speed

•    Don’t use unnecessary graphics. Instead of visually appealing design that use lots of graphics, go with a clean, compact design with as fewer graphics as possible

•    Use more CMS/HTML codes as it will improve your site speed

These are some most common tricks to increase site speed. In fact, you should fix everything affecting your site speed. The tools like Page Speed Insight that provides details of the reasons for slow loading along with keys and advice, to help you increase the speed. You can also use Google’s free page speed testing tool, “Webpage Test” that provides insights into page speed optimization.

But in fact, just getting theoretical knowledge is not enough to increase the speed. It takes a great deal of hands-on the know-how and techniques best SEO use to boosting a site speed. And this is why you should take SEO services; choose SEO services in India if you have a small budget,

To Conclude

Google uses loading speed as one of the factors to rank a website, and it has also brought an update for mobile search, it is time to work on site speed. The search engine penalizes slow loading sites even the sites have valuable content for users.

You should get to know each and every factor that affects your site speed. Instead of some common factors for slow sites, you can use site speed testing tools to have more details about the reasons for slow loading along with advice and recommendations for what should be done.