Site Speed, is it worth it from a SEO point?
-
Hi,
I understand a site which loads quickly is greater for the user but how does site speed affect rankings?
I mean does Google log the speed pages load, the faster it loads the better the signal? So say I have a page which loads in 1.5sec would Google 'Rate' the site better if it loaded in say 0.8sec?
Thanks.
-
One easy way that I've found to help with pagespeed is with cloudflare's free subscription. It does a lot to speed up your site, such as auto minifying, css, html and javascript. It also caches your pages and greatly reduces server response times. It also does some other stuff and offers security features which is another benefit.
-
One more here and just because I wanted to clarify this further on what Benjamin mentioned. Yes, site speed is important for SEO and we can go through all the reasons. The real reason you want good site speed is that you make more money as your users are happier. People who come to your site are more likely to convert the faster your site is, regardless of if they came from Google, Bing, Organic, Paid, direct, etc etc.
Amazon has actually calculated this. They estimate that a page load slowdown of 1 seconds would cost Amazon 1.6 billion in sales each year.
http://www.fastcompany.com/1825005/how-one-second-could-cost-amazon-16-billion-sales
This type of research has been done at many other companies, including Google. If you are trying to measure the impact of site speed, don't look just at ranking, look at conversion. There is where the real money is.
-
Not only is is worth it from a search engine point of view but also for your visitors, they want the site to load fast or else they might leave. Check out google speed test https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/ to see what you can do to make your website faster.
-
Yes, Google has been fairly overt when it comes to application performance. Just to give you a little insight into how important Google thinks speed is, they cut any internal application if it's even slightly sluggish. And further, wouldn't you think it's significant when they display that they've delivered nine billion results in .0000023454355 seconds?
There are a lot of easy, quick, wins you can have in under five minutes. Here's a couple to start you off.
GZip Compression:
Odds are you're using one of these server flavors. This is a very quick way to increase speed. Just be very careful when editing/updating .htaccess. The slightest bit of white space or a syntax error will take the site down. Your host may even be able to do this for you in some fashion, but a lot of them shy away from even supporting .htaccess. So once you start down that road, it's lonely a one - save for some forums.
Reduce Image File Size:
There are tons of ways to reduce image file size without a lot of hassle. Some will losslessly compress (no reduction in image quality) other forms are 'lossy'.
Google Page Speed Tool (Lossless - In Chrome Dev Console ctrl+shift+j, yo)
There are a ton of other ways, but these are some easy ways to get a faster page.
-
Hi,
I have had great results from speeding up pages of my site and I also spending quite a lot of time, money and effort keeping my pages as fast as possible. If you use tools like GTmetrix and google provides tools in GWMT you will see not only a decrease in pageload time but a boost in organic rankings and an overall better user experience. I agree with Prestashop 100%.
-
In short, yes. I cannot remember which article or which video I saw it in, but one of the guys from google was interviewed and someone said the term "search engine" to him. He replied that Google likes to think of themselves as an "experience engine". That being said, they strive to provide the sites that promote the best user experience. A slow site does not provide that. I would be willing to bet, 10 times out of 10, two sites that were equal in every other aspect, the faster one would rank higher.
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
-
When the site's entire URL structure changed, should we update the inbound links built pointing to the old URLs?
We're changing our website's URL structures, this means all our site URLs will be changed. After this is done, do we need to update the old inbound external links to point to the new URLs? Yes the old URLs will be 301 redirected to the new URLs too. Many thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jade1 -
I have an authority site with 90K visits per month. Now I have to change from non www to www. Will incur in any SEO issues while doing that? Could you please advice me on the best steps to follow to do this? Thank you very much!
Because I want to increase site speed, Siteground (my hosting) suggested I use Cloudflare Plus which needs my site to have www in order to work. I'm also using a cloud hosting. Im a bit scared of doing this, and thus decided to come to the community. I used MOZ for over 6 months now and love the tool. Please help me make the best possible decisions and what steps to follow. It would be much appreciated. Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Andrew_IT0 -
Site Navigation
Hi Mozzers, I am an SEO at uncommongoods.com and looking for your opinion on our site nav. Currently our nav & URLs are structured in 3 levels. From the top level down, they are: 1. Category ex: http://www.uncommongoods.com/home-garden 2. Subcat ex: http://www.uncommongoods.com/home-garden/bed-bath 3. Family ex:http://www.uncommongoods.com/home-garden/bed-bath/bath-accessories Right now, all levels are accessible from our top nav but we are considering removing the family pages. If we did that, Google could still find & crawl links to the family pages, but they would have to drill down to the subcat pages to find them. Do you guys think this would help or hurt our SEO efforts? Thanks! -Zack
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | znotes0 -
Multinational SEO
Hi all The situation: We have a .com website that is the core of our business over the last 3 years we have built this into a very sucessful brand. Customers are able to purchase products from our website and have it delivered anywhere in the world. As part of the development of our business we want to obviously rank high within serps regardless of what country our potential customer is from. We understand that we will need to translate much of our website to achieve this and that is something that we have in the pipeline. My question is more aimed at the English speaking countries and how we should optimise our website for these. For example: websitename.com.au and websitename.co.uk were initialy setup as 301 redirects to websitename.com, however, we have now set them up as their own domains which display the exact same content as the .com website. So to clarify the content on websitename.com/product1.html is also on websitename.com.au/product1.html and websitename.co.uk/product1.html What would the best way to ensure that our .com.au and .co.uk gain traction within the appropriate country? Is duplicate content still an issue? All our prices are displayed in USD will this go againts? We use US English (with a sprinkle of chinglish) as our websites copy languange should we change spelling for AU and UK? Does anyone have any case studies and or other reports I can read that may help me find the right solution for us. Thanks Danny
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DannyCarter0 -
New site now links disappearing in Open Site Explorer and GWT
We launched a new site at the beginning of December 2012 and carefully 301'd all URLs from the old site to the new (custom CMS on old site wordpress on new). Our rankings have slipped quite badly but the most worrying thing is that we used to have about 1200 backlinks according to GWT/OSE before the new site launched and now we're down to about 30. Can anyone help shed some light on this please? The site is www.littleoneslondon.co.uk A few things that might help: 1. We were getting a lot of links through our job feeds (it's a nanny recruitment site) on indeed and trovitt, for some reason no new ones from these have appeared in site explorer and all the old jobs are gone completely. 2. We had 1000s of not found errors in google webmaster tools and once these were redirected and marked as fixed this is when the links disappeared. 3. We are getting quite a few 504 errors on the site due to an old proxy redirect (/blog was hosted on a different server on the old site and has not been removed yet), this will be fixed tomorrow but could this be a factor? 4. The developer seems to have redirected all the links through wordpress directly some how (I don't see any redirect plugins but there are lots of pages called 'redirect'). There are no references in the htaccess file for any redirects other than from the /blog folder that the wordpress instance sits in. Sorry for the long post, I hope I've given any details you'd need and I really appreciate any help anyone can give. Thanks, Karl
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bdig0 -
Can Anybody Link to my URL to Hurt SEO? Weird URL pointing at my Domaine!
Our ranking has drop since a few weeks. I did not do any major change in my site. Surfing WebMaster Tool, I found lots of new URL linking at our site: url.org linkarena.com seoprofiler.com folkd.com digitalhome.ca bustingprice.com surepurchase.com lowpricetoday.com oyax.com couponfollow.com aspringcleaning.com pamabuy.com etzone.ca How do I find if those was done intentionelly to hurt SEO? Could it be possible? Thank you, BigBlaze
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BigBlaze2050 -
Mobile SEO vs. normal SEO?
Hi everyone, I wanted to ask you abour your opinon on mobile SEO. Do we already have two different Indices, one for mobile, one for desktop? Except a few mobile listings I don't see a difference yet. If yes, do I need to do special mobile SEO for my site or is it enough to have e.g. a responsive webdesign which detects the device and shows a different page? Are there any other extra Mobile SEO measures that should be considered? I know of the Mobile Sitemap and directories but is there anything else? Best regards
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CrazySEO0 -
Optimize a Classifieds Site
Hi, I have a classifieds website and would like to optimize it. The issues/questions I have: A Classifieds site has, say, 500 cities. Is it better to create separate subdomains for each city (http://city_name.site.com) or subdirectory (http://site.com/city_name)? Now in each city, there will be say 50 categories. Now these 50 categories are common across all the cities. Hence, the layout and content will be the same with difference of latest ads from each city and name of the city and the urls pointing to each category in the relevant city. The site architecture of a classifieds site is highly prone to have major content which is not really a duplicate content. What is the best way to deal with this situation? I have been hit by Panda in April 2011 with traffic going down 50%. However, the traffic since then has been around same level. How to best handle the duplicate content penalty in case with site like a classifieds site. Cheers!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ketan90