Google Page Speed
-
Is it worthwhile going after a good score on Google page speed?
Had prices but a LOT of money, and don't know if it's worth it or not.
Also to add to the complication it is a new site.
Does anyone have any experience if it helps rankings?
Thanks
-
So, I don't totally agree with the statement "it's not worth it, UNLESS you have fixed every other SEO issue," although I totally see where Josh is coming from. From a purely "how well will this affect how my site ranks in Google" perspective, Josh is right, there are usually a lot of other things that you could be spending time or money on that would have bigger bang for your buck - but there are other reasons to want your site to load quickly (such as that users like it and it makes it easier to access your site using mobile devices).
In my experience/testing, page load time doesn't start to affect your rankings unless your site is really, really, really slow, well over 10 seconds of page load time. So anything under around 15 seconds on average, you're not going to see a negative SEO affect. From there, it's just a matter of making things as fast as you can, for your users, in ways that make sense for you.
Whenever I make recommendations to speed up a site there are always things where I'm like "this is not going to make that much of an impact so if it's going to cost a lot of money to do, you shouldn't do it." What those things are and how much time/money they'll take to fix will be different for everyone. I would say, fix the things that you can fix cheaply and easily (this is usually things like compressing images, inlining resources, and changing cache expiration). Save the stuff that's going to take more time and money and keep it in mind for the next time you want to make other substantial updates to your site.
-
I would like to point out I am not green to SEO, but explicit answers do help
The site is brand-new and built-in WordPress, I'm not aware of any major issues impacting.
-
Could you elaborate what you mean by 'every other SEO issue'
Thanks
-
It surprises me that it would cost a lot of money. It can be costly if you want to get 100% score - but most of the time things like optimising your images, gzip & minify your content, caching ... shouldn't cost a fortune.
Don't forget to also check tools like Webpagetest.org - which are checking the actual load time.
These are complimentary to Page speed insights. As an example: if you serve a 5 1000KB images that are compressed and optimized Google Page Speed insights will be quite happy - however - on Webpagetest.org you will see the impact of these heavy images on load time.
As Matt is saying - speed is important - and will probably become more important in the future (increasing number of visits on mobile devices with slower network connections)
Dirk
-
Yes, pagespeed is a confirmed Google ranking factor. You should try to optimise as much as possible. Depending on what's currently wrong this can be anywhere from a half hour job to a full site rebuild. If you had multiple high quotes, it's probably leaning toward the latter. Happy to take a look if you leave a domain here or drop me a PM. But yes, site speed does matter. The more difficult & competitive the keywords, the more it matters.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Client has an inexplicable jump in crawled pages being reported in Google Search Console
Recently a client of mine noticed an inexplicable jump in crawled pages being reported in Google Search Console. We researched the following culprits and found nothing: Rel=canonicals are put in place No SSL/non SSL duplication We used a tool to extrapolate search query page data from Google Search Insights; nothing unusual No dynamic pages being made on the website All necessary landing pages are in the XML sitemap Could this be a glitch in GSC? We are wondering what the heck is going on. 7eaeS
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BigChad20 -
Does Google give weight to the default measurement units (metric / imperial) on pages?
Hi, We run a series of weather websites that cater for the units (feet, metres, Celsius, Fahrenheight etc.) for the users by means of detecting their geo-location. So users in the US see the site in feet, Fahrenheight and pretty much the rest of the world gets metric units. My concern is that if we view the cached version of our pages as seen by the Googlebot out of Mountain View, California, it shows that our geoIP switch to imperial units has been activated for every location in the World. The question is, does the fact that we appear to cater for countries who use metric units by showing (in Google's eyes) Imperial units by default count against us from an SEO point of view? Thanks in advance for any comments, Nick
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nickruss0 -
Possible to Improve Domain Authority By Improving Content on Low Page Rank Pages?
My sites domain authority is only 23. The home page has a page authority of 32. My site consists of about 400 pages. The topic of the site is commercial real estate (I am a real estate broker). A number of the sites we compete against have a domain authority of 30-40. Would our overall domain authority improved if we re-wrote the content for several hundred of pages that had the lowest page authority (say 12-15)? Is the overall domain authority derived by an average of the page authority of each page on a domain? Alternatively could we increase domain authority by setting the pages with the lowest page authority to "no index". By the way our domain is www.nyc-officespace-leader.com Thanks, Alan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan10 -
Why does our business directions page rank above business profile page
Hi All, We are having an issue at the moment where our business direction page is ranking above the main business profile page. Our website is zodio.com, similar to Yelp but for South East Asia. An example of each page is below: Business Profile Page - http://www.zodio.com/business/detail/126037914/chowking Business Directions - http://www.zodio.com/business/direction/126037914 On many of our long tail searches for particular businesses, the business directions rank above the business details. Does anyone have any idea of why this would happen? I have researched Yelp and they do not have this issue. A few search examples in Google are as follows (one is in Thai): agonos dental clinic เวิลด์ชาร์มมิ่ง kawanku elektrik I have been rattling my brain and search for answers but cannot find anything. The communities help would be much appreciated. Many Thanks, Neil W
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | zodiothailand0 -
Why the archive sub pages are still indexed by Google?
Why the archive sub pages are still indexed by Google? I am using the WordPress SEO by Yoast, and selected the needed option to get these pages no-index in order to avoid the duplicate content.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MichaelNewman1 -
Our login pages are being indexed by Google - How do you remove them?
Each of our login pages show up under different subdomains of our website. Currently these are accessible by Google which is a huge competitive advantage for our competitors looking for our client list. We've done a few things to try to rectify the problem: - No index/archive to each login page Robot.txt to all subdomains to block search engines gone into webmaster tools and added the subdomain of one of our bigger clients then requested to remove it from Google (This would be great to do for every subdomain but we have a LOT of clients and it would require tons of backend work to make this happen.) Other than the last option, is there something we can do that will remove subdomains from being viewed from search engines? We know the robots.txt are working since the message on search results say: "A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt – learn more." But we'd like the whole link to disappear.. Any suggestions?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | desmond.liang1 -
How can you indexed pages or content on pages that are behind a pay wall or subscription login.
I have a client that has a boat of awesome content they provide to their client that's behind a pay wall ( ie: paid subscribers can only access ) Any suggestions mozzers? How do I get those pages index? Without completely giving away the contents in the front end.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BizDetox0 -
No equivalent page to re-direct to for highly trafficked pages, what should we do?
We have several old pages on our site that we want to get rid of, but we don't want to 404 them since they have decent traffic numbers. Would it be fine to set up a 301 re-direct from all of these pages to our home page? I know the best option is to find an equivalent page to re-direct to, but there isn't a great equivalent.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0