Last month I wrote about rumors that Google would be introducing a page load speeds as a factor in search rankings. Today Matt Cutts, Google engineer and blogger, confirmed that the rumors are true. Here's what we know so far.
According to Google, the changes will affect a small percentage of total sites initially.
Currently, fewer than 1% of search queries are affected by the site speed signal in our implementation and the signal for site speed only applies for visitors searching in English on Google.com at this point.
Regardless of the fact that only a small number of site owners that will initially see their site rankings change, it is still wise for all site owners to optimize the speed of their websites. Faster loading pages improve user experience and can result in higher site conversions, especially on e-commerce sites where sometimes one or two seconds can be the difference between an abandoned shopping cart and a completed sale.
There are many ways to improve your website's page load speed, but a few common methods include:
- Optimize graphics to minimize file size, especially elements that are loaded on every page, such as headers, footers, logos and icons
- Use CSS styled text instead of graphics for navigation and other alphanumeric elements on your site. This is a common practice on many sites and there's very rarely a good reason to use graphics instead of text for navigation elements.
- Be sure to set content expiration headers on files such as graphics, CSS, JavaScript includes and other static page elements. You may need to ask your hosting provider for help with this. (If you're an InetSolution hosting client, contact us and we'll help you with this.)
- Minimize the size of CSS and JavaScript include files by removing unnecessary comments and condensing duplicate styles or functions.
- Minify CSS and JavaScript files to further reduce their size
- Clean up your HTML code to remove unnecessary comments, use CSS instead of tables for layout. It's not uncommon for us to reduce page sizes by 60% or more by simply optimizing the HTML code within a site when a client hires us for optimization.
- Optimize server side code to speed up processing and rendering. This is another area where we almost always are able to dramatically improve application performance on websites and applications that we inherit.
- Reduce the number of calls your web pages make to external resources, such as third-party analytics programs, advertising services or content includes.
- Enable compression on your web server to reduce the size of data passed between the web server and web browser (or Googlebot).
- If your web server is heavily loaded, then upgrading your hosting plan or provider could also improve speed. You should check other factors first though as you're likely to get more bang for your buck out of the types of optimizations suggested above.
Most of these optimizations are going to need to be performed by professionals and are not DIY solutions (unless you're a programmer or designer, of course). It's also important establish benchmarks before you begin optimizing so you know whether you're achieving improvements. Also make sure to test changes as you're performing them because there will be performance trade-offs in some instances, such as content compression.
Remember, SEO is only one small reason to invest in these optimizations. SEO may be the trigger that starts the discussion, and that's fine, but ultimately improving user experience is the biggest payoff. As Matt reminds us:
....take step back for a minute and consider the intent of this change: a faster web is great for everyone, but especially for users. Lots of websites have demonstrated that speeding up the user experience results in more usage. So speeding up your website isn’t just something that can affect your search rankings–it’s a fantastic idea for your users.
Now go make your website blazing fast!
Additional Resources
Facebook Example
Facebook has some fascinating results from testing they performed to determine how changes in factors such as site speed and page loading performance would impact user experience and user behavior. The results are worth reading and provide lessons that are applicable to virtually any website.
If pages take longer to load but people still spend the same amount of time on Facebook, then the number of page views is inversely proportional to the page loading time. On the other side of the coin, it means that since people tend to spend the same amount of time on Facebook, improving site speed would allow them to explore much more content and discover more of the network around them each visit.
Shopzilla.com Example
Improving user experience via faster sites has real impact on the bottom line, too. Watch this video from Phil Dixon, VP of Engineering at Shopzilla.com. Shopzilla saw significant revenue and traffic increases after improving, among other things, site speed. For a site that reaches 20 to 30 million visitors per month, even minor improvements have profound ripple effects.
Apr 9, 2010 • by Jason Sherrill
