How Fast Should Your Website Download?

‘Site Speed’, we are told by Google in the above video, is a ranking factor. But as with any factor Google confirms is a ranking signal, it’s usually a small, ‘nuanced’ one.

A fast site is a good user experience (UX), and a satisfying UX leads to higher conversions.

How fast your website loads is a critical – but often completely ignored – element in any online business – and that includes search marketing and search engine optimisation.

Very slow sites are a bad user experience – and Google is all about GOOD UX these days.

How Much is ‘Website Speed’ a Google Ranking Factor?

‘How much is a very slow site a negative ranking factor’ is a more useful interpretation of the claim that ‘website speed is a Google ranking factor‘.

First – for I have witnessed VERY slow websites of 10 seconds and more negatively impacted in Google, and second, from statements made by Googlers:

We do say we have a small factor in there for pages that are really slow to load where we take that into account. John Mueller, GOOGLE

Google might crawl your site slower if you have a slow site. And that’s bad – especially if you are adding new content or making changes to it.

We’re seeing an extremely high response-time for requests made to your site (at times, over 2 seconds to fetch a single URL). This has resulted in us severely limiting the number of URLs we’ll crawl from your site.John Mueller, GOOGLE

John specifically said 2 seconds disrupts CRAWLING activity, not RANKING ability, but you get the picture.

How Fast Should Your Website Load in 2016?

Recent research is hard to find, but would indicate as fast as possible.

Article published on http://www.hobo-web.co.uk/