Page load speed?
-
Hi everyone, hope you've all had a good new years celebration.
Just a quick one on page load speed? how important do you think it is to organic rankings, especially on competitive terms?
Any tips on improving it? do i need to improve just the landing page im trying to rank or every page as its looked at as a qualtiy score as a whole?
Kind Regards,
-
Page and site load speed/time is a factor as Matt has said in the past. It's beginning to take more effective value in the 'user experience' which Google is trumpeting in past months.
I would surely aim to analyze and look over the data you need to see the value in taking the time to start correcting issues with regards to your site speed and load times.
Yslow is a great tool for sure, but you can also download a chrome AP called 'SEO Site Tools', which has some great features to determine things like this. I would also look to incorporate Gzip into your site for compression.
You might also want to look at the file size of the homepage. If it exceeds 30kb, it's probably too large, and taking more time than needed to call the HTTP requests for various CSS, JS scripts, images, etc..
Just some more things too look at
Cheers.
-
According to Matt Cutts page load speed is not as important as a ranking factor as one may think.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3zmP0W26M0 old video, there is a newer one from 2011 which i cannot find
Regarding the usefulness of page load speed: I heard about tests run by amazon and google that more or less lead to the conclusion that 1% faster meant 1% more revenue (to be taken with a grain of salt). But it is obvious that really fast pages produce more pageviews (and ultimately more ad-revenue etc.) and also increasing your sites user metrics (time on site, avg PI ...).
Some tips: go over every element and ask yourself whether you really need that element.
As Robert stated I would aim for a average page on an average domain to load between 1,5s and 2s.
Good ressources are:
Googles own Tool "PageSpeed"
-
I think if the page is "slow" it will have a negative effect if for no other reason than some people will not wait for it to load. The question is, what is slow? For me, I like a page to load within two seconds or less. This is certainly not fast, but I don't think it is slow in terms of the engines.
The biggest issues we see that effect page load speed are failure to use expires headers, too many http requests, etc. We use Yslow on any site to check for things we can speed up. It will tell you where the site is slow (Cause and solution) which makes it easy for anyone. YSlow is a free download and works on Chrome and FireFox for sure.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
What to do with temporary empty pages?
I have a website listing real estate in different areas that are for sale. In small villages, towns, and areas, sometimes there is nothing for sale and therefore the page is completely empty with no content except a and some footer text. I have thousand of landing pages for different areas. For example "Apartments in Tibro" or "Houses in Ljusdahl" and Moz Pro gives me some warnings for "Duplicate Content" on the empty ones (I think it does so because the pages are so empty that they are quite similar). I guess Google could also think bad of my site if I have hundreds or thousands of empty pages even if my total amount of pages are 100,000. So, what to do with these pages for these small cities, towns and villages where there is not always houses for sale? Should I remove them completely? Should I make a 404 when no houses for sale and a 200 OK when there is? Please note that I have totally 100,000+ pages and this is only about 5% of all my pages.
Technical SEO | | marcuslind900 -
Advice on whether we 301 redirect a page or update existing page?
Hi guys, any advice would be really appreciated. We have an existing page that ranks well for 'red widgets'. The page isn't monetised right now, but we're bringing in a new product onto our site that we optimised for 'blue widgets'. Unfortunately, not enough research was done for this page and we've now realised that consumers actually search for 'red widgets' when looking for the product we're creating as 'blue widgets'. The problem with this is that the 'red widgets' page is in a completely different category of our site than what it needs to be (it needs to be with 'blue widgets'). So, my question is; Should we do a 301 redirect from our 'red-widgets' page to our 'blue-widgets' page which we want to update and optimise the content on there for 'red-widgets'. Or, should we update the existing red-widgets page to have the right products and content on there, even thought it is in the wrong place of our site and users could get confused as to why they are there. If we do a 301 redirect to our new page, will we lose our rankings and have to start again, or is there a better way around this? Thanks! Dave
Technical SEO | | davo230 -
Auto generated pages
Hi, I have two sites showing (crawl report from SEOMoz.org) extremely high numbers of duplicate titles and descriptions (e.g., 33,000). These sites have CMSs behind them and so the duplicate titles, etc., are a result of auto-generated pages. What is the best way to address these problems? Thanks! David
Technical SEO | | DWill0 -
Why are pages linked with URL parameters showing up as separate pages with duplicate content?
Only one page exists . . . Yet I link to the page with different URL parameters for tracking purposes and for some reason it is showing up as a separate page with duplicate content . . . Help? rpcIZ.png
Technical SEO | | BlueLinkERP0 -
Issue: Duplicate Page Content
Hi All, I am getting warnings about duplicate page content. The pages are normally 'tag' pages. I have some blog posts tagged with multiple 'tags'. Does it really affect my site?. I am using wordpress and Yoast SEO plugin. Thanks
Technical SEO | | KLLC0 -
Noindex Pages indexed
I'm having problem that gogole is index my search results pages even though i have added the "noindex" metatag. Is the best thing to block the robot from crawling that file using robots.txt?
Technical SEO | | Tedred0 -
Product category paging
Hi, My product categories have 2-3 pages each. I have paging implemented with rel=next and rel=prev. from some reason Google GWT now reports the pages as having duplicate titles and description. Should I be worried? Should I set a different title like "blue category - page x" ? Thanx, Asaf
Technical SEO | | AsafY0 -
Page rank 2 for home page, 3 for service pages
Hey guys, I have noticed with one of our new sites, the home page is showing page rank two, whereas 2 of the internal service pages are showing as 3. I have checked with both open site explorer and yahoo back links and there are by far more links to the home page. All quality and relevant directory submissions and blog comments. The site is only 4 months old, I wonder if anyone can shed any light on the fact 2 of the lesser linked pages are showing higher PR? Thanks 🙂
Technical SEO | | Nextman0