Have you wondered how your page speed affects your search engine ranking? Does it even affect where your website ranks? Well, yes it does and here’s why…
What does Google say about it
Google is never backward in coming forward but wanting website owners to implement particular technologies and strategies. And, with page load speed it’s no different. Since 2010 they have been speaking publicly about the fact that they use ‘site speed’ as a ranking signal. While site speed was not a factor in Google’s Mobile First index, yet, that’s likely to change so. In fact, the expectation is the site speed as a ranking factor in mobile search will be released sometime this year. So, site speed will soon be a ranking factor across the board as far as Google is concerned.
What does everyone else say about it
Now we all know that Google are not always completely upfront about their algorithm, so we are not likely to ever know just how much page speed affects our search engine rankings. But, that’s ok because we can look at bit beyond Google. We can take a look at some correlation studies from some extremely bright data scientists. Google’s algorithm is so complex and yet the studies do show a correlation between ‘sites that rank higher also tend to have faster page load times than the average site’.
If you’re really interested in all the data collected and analysed just Google these:
- Backlinko study of 1 million Google search results
- Neil Patel analysis of 143827 URLs
- Moz analysis of 2000 random search queries
What can you do about it
So, determining that both Google says and data suggests that there is a correlation between page speed and Google rankings, how does that affect your site and what can you do about it?
Bite the bullet and actually speed up your site. Even if search engine results had no effect on your search ranking, you should still speed it up. A fast loading website and pages provides a much better user experience and the conversion rate will be better too. How to speed up your site will depend on the platform you are using so the best place to start is to test your website on different devices, if you’re not happy with how fast they load, contact the team at Website Design Centre for advice on the next step.
And now may be the best time to speed things up – well the relationship better site speed and search engine rank is currently restricted to desktop – mobile is coming very soon.
You also need to remember that it’s not just about what a reader would consider as a website’s page load time – you need to also consider more technical issues such as how quickly your server responds to requests.
