Faster Load Times Really Matters!
Writing by Nick Stamoulis
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One of the factors that can seriously affect your on site search engine optimization efforts in a positive way is your website page load time. Interestingly, websites are rarely penalized for having slow load times, but if you increase your page load time you can often see positive results including increased page rankings that will lead to more visitors over time. Also, another reason to have faster load times on your website is user experience. Your site visitors will appreciate it for sure!
This is not across the board. It depends a great deal on how much you improve your page load time. If your page already loads about average and you increase the page load speed by just a few nanoseconds, that likely won’t help you. But if your page load speed is a couple of seconds below par and you increase it by a second-and-a-half then that could be a significant factor in future rankings for your targeted keywords.
As you can see, there are some variables that operate on page load speed. The idea is to create a faster web. More people today expect faster page load times than ever before. That creates a demand for faster page load times. Therefore, the search engines want to reward those sites that deliver on that demand.
What are some ways you can increase page load time? Here are a few ideas:
- Try using fewer photos and videos. If your page is heavily packed with large files like photos and videos, they will cause your load time to slow. Try deleting some from the page.
- Use external files. If you have a lot of CSS or JavaScript on a page, you can put it into a separate file and reference that file on your page, increasing your page load time. When a browser tries to read your page it will load the elements that it can find on the page and call out for the external files when it needs them. This increases your page load speed.
- Make your images smaller. Large images take up a lot of data space and cause your page to load slower. Make the images smaller and see what happens.
The idea is to streamline your pages as much as possible. The key to faster load times is smaller images and external files. Code streamlining will go a long way to increasing page load times and it could mean an extra nudge in the ranking wars and more people coming to your website.
6 Responses to “Faster Load Times Really Matters!”
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This is very sound advice. People are so used to instantly getting information on the web that if they have to wait for more than a few seconds they become irritated and even leave the site if they have to wait too long. Although having videos and lots of pictures on your website may be visually appealing, if people have to wait a while to get them, most likely they will never take the time to see them.
Hi Elizabeth,
You are very correct, most people do get irritated if they have wat any amount of time for a page to load…
Hi Nick. I’ve been enjoying your postings and have learned a lot. With reference to this article, is there a standard or benchmark for websites to meet as far as load times? While developers toolbars, etc. give me a good idea how long any site I’ve done loads, how do I know if its good, average, above-average, etc? Any pointing in the right direction would be great.
thanks
Charles Runyan
Hi Charles,
Thanks for reading and your kind words!
I am sure load time type data (what is good vs needs improvement) exists somewhere but I have personally not seen this type of study as of yet. I normally like to keep total load time (if I can help it) below 2 to 3 seconds, sometimes widgets and other types of elements lead to an overall increase of load time besides images on a page. Anyway, if i happen to come across this type of data in my travels I will be sure to pass it along in a follow up post.
Hi Nick,
Another good post…thank you.
In doing some research on the Google website regarding load time, I came across this:
“We evaluate your load time relative to the average in your server’s geographic region. If your website is hosted on a server in India, for example, your landing page load time will be compared to the average load time in that region of India. This is true even if your website is intended for an audience in the United States.” Google further states, “To ensure accuracy, we take several load time measurements, drop the worst, and average those remaining. If your landing page is down for one of these readings, therefore, it won’t affect your load time grade.”
While the above information is helpful, Google doesn’t give any hard numbers regarding a target load time.
However, there are some tools out there that can show how long other sites take to load. Using these tools, an idea of a “good” load time could possibly be gleaned by analyzing the top 10 sites in Google for your primary keyword. This will at least give you an idea of where other top-ranked sites are in terms of load time, which you can compare to your site’s load time.
I hope this helps.
Tom
Hi Tom,
Thanks for your comment and sharing the additional information about page load time, do you have the link at Google that references this information so everyone can read the full context?
Thanks!
Nick