Does Server Speed Effect SEO Rankings?

[chronicle]

I was told by a website developer that Google ranks sites higher if they are hosted on faster servers.  Is this true?  For example my site is currently limited because it is a Quick Shopping Cart site hosted by Godaddy.  He said that if I hosted my research chemical site with a different company with faster servers I could get better ranking immediately.  I linked to my site. I think it loads ok.  However Godaddy probably isn't the fastest service around.

[chronicle]

Godaddy is touting their new 4gh servers and also a premium dns that guarantees 99.9 percent up time.  Have you tested these?

[chronicle]

Thanks for that site link... It says I have a B for page load speed but a D for Yslow grade?  I am not sure what the difference between Yslow and page load are?

[edwardlewis]

is this thread spam?

[edwardlewis]

slow websites are rubbish.. even if it's not a ranking factor its pretty boring waiting for stuff to load!

without moving server you can still improve the code to make it faster:

http://gtmetrix.com/reports/www.buy-research-chemicals.com/sOqqeQx0

[chronicle]

Thank you for the smushit site... I am using it right now...

[KeriMorgret]

Hi Chronicle,

You might also investigate other ways to speed up your site, such as making sure your images are optimized. Your home page images are all identical, and the file size could easily be cut in half with http://www.smushit.com/ysmush.it/.

Honestly, I would worry less about your server at this point, and more about other things that might send off some spammy signals to Google. The text of your website claims that it is just for research purposes, but the links coming to the site that show in Open Site Explorer have a lot of "buy viagra" anchor text coming from .edu pages that have been heavily spammed. The image that's often repeated on the home page has the filename of buy-sildenafil-citrate_00.jpg. The alt text for the free shipping image is "buy research chemicals", etc.

[JamesNorquay]

I think the key with having a quick running site is more a usability one, if the site runs slow especially e-commerce users will bounce to other websites and competitors.

Site speed has been noted as a small factor to ranking yet their are 100s of ranking factors.

Godaddy servers are not the best at all from my experience, I have tested a few servers their a while ago, depends on what type of server you are after too - dedicated server, shared host ect.

Also up time of the server is another important factor, geo location of the sever i.e is it close to your main user base is also important with e-commerce.

[BailHotline]

Hi Chronicle,

I would say your first statement is false to some extent. Although website and hosting speeds play a role in ranking as stated in a blog post by Google, it is very minor... less then 1%, so I highly doubt that moving to a "faster" server will yield "higher rankings immediately".

As long as your code is written correctly, images are optimized for web and you maybe even have compression on the server side for your site, you should be in pretty good condition.

Hope this helps!

Here is another Google Post on this topic.

[TampaSEO]

See this article:

http://searchengineland.com/google-now-counts-site-speed-as-ranking-factor-39708

Key takeaway: speed is a ranking factor, but it's a very, very minor one. Definitely does not carry enough weight to justify moving servers.

Hope this helps!