Site Speed
-
I was wondering what benefits there are to investing the time and money into speeding up an eCommerce site. We are currently averaging 3.4 seconds of load time per page and I know from webmaster tools they hold the mark to be at closer to 1.5 seconds. Is it worth it to get to 1.5 seconds? Any tips for doing this?
Thanks
-
@JustDucky We recently migrated to a data center and the average loading time dropped from ~4 seconds to ~0.9. I to noticed only 1-2% drop in bounce rate. It seems only that many people were turned off by the loading times. Then again 1-2% can be anything.
@John O'Haver I would invest the time simply because ~3.4 is the average value. This means that sometimes it goes up to 10 or even more. Take a look at your analytics account and see the performance per country. Also, I've been benchmarking analytics with remote monitoring solutions and I find a discrepancy of about 30% (probably due to limited sample date from analytics). I don't want to advertise any available solutions, but trying one won't hurt. You may find your times to be better (I hope).
-
Cypra correctly points out that faster sites make for a better user experience and Alan pointed out how inexpensive CDN can be. I installed CDN on a site that already uses WP3TC. Page load speeds cut in half but the bounce rate (which is very high) dropped by only 1 or 2%.
Has anyone who has multiple sites sampled their bounce rates before and after they installed CDN?
-
As Doug just said, there is a strong correlation between Page speed and user experience, when a user needs to wait for a page or something to load before getting the information, there is a higher bounce rate. Since the bounce rate is a strong indicator of user satisfaction that will sooner or later be implemented in algorithmic factors, it's good to adress it right from the conception phase.
-
It's not just the search engines you need to consider. Is the speed of your site affecting user experience? Are people giving up because it's just too slow? How many abandoned sessions are you getting? Do you have any opportunity to get feedback from your users?
-
Matt Cutts has said that you need to be pretty slow to incure a penalty, less than 1% of sites fall into this category.
It all depends on what is taking so long. is it download, is it slow code, is it the server?
if downloads is the problem, i would look into using a content delevery system CDN, in short hosting your images and static files in the cloud, I use Microsoft Azure Cloud services This will cost you very little in money, could be as little as a $1 a month.
You can also use this tool from google to get suggestions, but using a cdn would be the best gain.
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
-
Anyone suspect that a site's total page count affects SEO?
I've been trying to find out the underlying reason why so many websites are ranked higher than mine despite seemingly having far worse links. I've spent a lot of time researching and have read through all the general advice about what could possibly be hurting my site's SEO, from page speed to h1 tags to broken links, and all the various on-page SEO optimization stuff....so the issue here isn't very obvious. From viewing all of my competitors, they seem to have a much higher number of web pages on their sites than mine does. My site currently has 20 pages or so and most of my competitors are well in the hundreds, so I'm wondering if this could potentially be part of the issue here. I know Google has never officially said that page number matters, but does anyone suspect that perhaps page count matters towards SEO and that competing sites with more total pages than you might have an advantage SEOwise?
Algorithm Updates | | ButtaC1 -
How long for google to de-index old pages on my site?
I launched my redesigned website 4 days ago. I submitted a new site map, as well as submitted it to index in search console (google webmasters). I see that when I google my site, My new open graph settings are coming up correct. Still, a lot of my old site pages are definitely still indexed within google. How long will it take for google to drop off or "de-index" my old pages? Due to the way I restructured my website, a lot of the items are no longer available on my site. This is on purpose. I'm a graphic designer, and with the new change, I removed many old portfolio items, as well as any references to web design since I will no longer offering that service. My site is the following:
Algorithm Updates | | rubennunez
http://studio35design.com0 -
Are there any alternative ranking strategies for not a blog site other than on site SEO, speed improvement, building backlinks and social media engagement to improve rankings?
We own a horoscope website and looking for some SEO advice.However most of the websites are blog sites therefore most of the SEO content is about how to rank a blog site better. IE getting new quality content, use anchor text link out etc. However if your site is different by nature it is hard to find good advice on how to rank better in these scenarios. I would like to know if there are alternative ways of increasing rankings apart from the usual strategies of improving social media fan pages, building backlinks and optimising the site speed wise and making it accessible and understandable to crawlers and people too.
Algorithm Updates | | websitebuilder0 -
Old Site But No Traffic - Can Anyone Tell Reason ?
Hi , Can anyone please tell me why this site http://www.travelscience.com is not getting any traffic? Its 13 years old domain having 2340 indexed pages and Its Alexa rank is 6186158 Can anyone please identity the problems with it. I found it from Google doing the keyword research on the Travel topics. I am curious to know the potential problem with this site. Thanks in advance for your time. Regards
Algorithm Updates | | kywebsol0 -
Why does Google say they have more URLs indexed for my site than they really do?
When I do a site search with Google (i.e. site:www.mysite.com), Google reports "About 7,500 results" -- but when I click through to the end of the results and choose to include omitted results, Google really has only 210 results for my site. I had an issue months back with a large # of URLs being indexed because of query strings and some other non-optimized technicalities - at that time I could see that Google really had indexed all of those URLs - but I've since implemented canonical URLs and fixed most (if not all) of my technical issues in order to get our index count down. At first I thought it would just be a matter of time for them to reconcile this, perhaps they were looking at cached data or something, but it's been months and the "About 7,500 results" just won't change even though the actual pages indexed keeps dropping! Does anyone know why Google would be still reporting a high index count, which doesn't actually reflect what is currently indexed? Thanks!
Algorithm Updates | | CassisGroup0 -
If the homepage is sandboxed for a keyword is the whole site sandboxed for that keyword?
If the homepage of a website has been sandboxed for certain keywords does this mean that the whole site is sandboxed for them keywords or just the homepage? If a new sub-page was created with quality unique content, would it be possible to get that sub-page ranked for the same keywords that have been sandboxed on the homepage? I have asked many other SEO professionals this same question and nobody really knows for sure. Do you?
Algorithm Updates | | Mark A Preston0 -
Does google have the worst site usability?
Google tells us to make our sites better for our readers, which we are doing, but do you think google has horrible site usabilty? For example, in webmaster tools, I'm always being confused by their changes and the way they just drop things. In the HTML suggestions area, they don't tell you when the data was last updated, so the only way to tell is to download the files and check. In the URL removals, they used to show you the URLs they had removed. Now that is gone and the only way you can check is to try adding one. We don't have any URL parameters, so any parameters are as a result of some other site tacking on stuff at the end of our URL and there is no way to tell them that we don't have any parameters, so ignore them all. Also, they add new parameters they find on the end of the list, so the only way to check is to click through to the end of the list.
Algorithm Updates | | loopyal0
