Site Speed, Google’s Next Ranking Factor

It’s about time… There’s some dead wood that needs to cleaned out.

Even if the penalties are relatively small, hopefully just the act of talking about it will get advertisers to pay attention to load speeds. In truth, the real penalties of having a slow site go far beyond any dings Google might apply: the real toll is taken from conversion rates and the damage done to customer retention.

There’s also a more subtle point. The slower the load speeds the bigger the tracking hole in your site analytics. As I mentioned in a post last spring, javascript tracking fires from the page footer. Slow page loads mean more people click off the landing page before the footer loads; those folks are seen as “untracked” even though they may have come through a marketing program. Undercrediting the marketing program leads to underspending. In this sense, it’s in Google’s interest to insist on faster loading sites.

George

Google already penalises advertisers for slow page load as page landing page speed is a factor in Google Adwords Quality Score. Slow landing page = higher ad cost. It it becomes a factor in the organic ranking algorithm then things will get interesting especially for sites that depend on data loading from other sites e.g. youtube, adsense and other ad networks – before their page fully loads. Its one thing slowing your own page down but another thing someone else doing it, so, such a move could have serious repercussions for third party ”content”‘ providers – well…if your content slows down my page and my site’s ranking is effected then…..

The company I work have a web performance person dedicated to the speed of our sites, this has been on our radar simply from the prespective of providing a good user experience for a long time – customers prefer fast websites – period. Happy customers spend more. We use a website accelerator called Aptimize to do the job, but depending on your CMS there are add-ons and plugins available to help increase your site speed. This was a little hint from Matt and therefore something to act on before January by the sounds of it.

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