Is Your Page Load Speed Up To Snuff?

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

One of the criteria that could affect your trust rank is page load speed. That is, how fast your pages load in your users’ browsers so they can view them.

There are several things that can affect page load speed:

• Excessive use of photos or videos
• Landing pages, or index pages, created from Flash
• Code bloat, a condition where you have a lot more code on your pages than you need
• Poorly designed website with too much graphic enhancement
• Slow server speed
• Too many external files that need to be accessed in order for the page to load properly

If you have a site with a combination of these problems then you could be setting yourself up for failure before you get any visitors. Not only will human visitors leave in droves if your pages don’t load fast enough, but spiders will balk as well. And if that happens then the search engines will not treat your site well and you’ll fall in the rankings. If you use file downloads and they are corrupted, get hacked, or attract viruses then the search engines could flag them as dangerous sites, which is happening more and more often. That’s another problem altogether.

Page load speed is a major factor in rankings now. It would behoove you to pay attention to the files on your server, how they are stored, and design elements that can cause your pages to load slowly.