PageSpeed Vs Page Size
-
Hi,
We all know that Google doesnt like slow loading pages, fair enough! However, for one of my websites, user interactivity is key to its success. Now each of my pages are fairly large sized (ranges in the order or 1.8 to 2.5 MB) because it has a lot of pictures, css and at times some Java script elements.
However, I have tried to ensure that the code is optimized - for example html minified and compressed, caching enables, images optimized and served through CDN, etc. In spite of high page size, my GTMetrix PageSpeed score is 93+ for most pages.
However, the number of requests served is 100+ and page loading time is 4.5s + as per GTMetrix and Pingdom.
My question is - should this matter from an SEO perspective. Is google likely to penalize me for high loading time even though I am serving highly optimized pages? I really dont want to cut down on the user interactiveness of my website unless I have to from an SEO perspective.
Please suggest. Here is my homepage, just as to give you an idea of what i am talking about:
-
Thanks Cyrus and Max,
Very good answer and I am going to work as per your suggestions
-
As Max said, from a ranking perspective, Time to First Byte seems to be the most important factor. The same author of that post offered some tips to improving time to first byte: http://moz.com/blog/improving-search-rank-by-optimizing-your-time-to-first-byte
Oftentimes, you simply have a lot of assets to load and it's difficult to cut anything back. In these cases, the order that things load becomes increasingly important for user experience (asynchronous java script, for example).
Regardless, doing everything you can to improve speed and checking with Google Page Speed Insights is usually the best advice. I've never, ever seen a website where improving speed performance didn't help with traffic metrics (wether rankings or engagement) so I believe it's an investment worth making.
-
What google really cares about is the TTFB (Time To First Byte), to check it just head for GWT, in crawl stats.
To date the general consensus is above 1s is bad and google could penalize you, below .5s is good and google could improve your ranking a little bit.
Google suggest using webpagetest to check a website performance: if you run the test for your website you will se the TTFB is not that bad: http://www.webpagetest.org/result/141124_MF_14DY/
Your overall load time is 10s and I agree is too much, it's supposedly worse your user experience, increasing your bounce rate and alienating some of your visitors. You should work to improve it, webpagetest suggest to compress images and use leverage browser cache, which are good suggestions.
Analyze closely the waterfall to investigate further and identify other areas of interventions.
-
Hi there,
I think it would improve page load if the youtube video was the last to load.
Hope it helps you.
-
You are right! Which is why I dont want to compromise on usability. Thanks for your response
-
give it some time! It should be ok. The main issue with speed should be if the users are fine with it. Think of people before SEO and you ll be fine!
-
Thanks for your response, but the images are possibly as optimized as they could be. I use ImageOptim for Mac to optimize them, they are all jpegs (stripped from all metadata) and enabled for (mild) lossy to WebP on supported browsers.
Do you feel there might be anything else that I could do?
-
Am sure you could work on the optimization a bit more, especially of the images.
none the less if you require the same structure and you are unable to change the size then I would not worry so much about it. Having a fast website is only one of the hundred of different factors that affect SEO. Just work on the other factors and it will be fine!
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
-
Pages automatically generated
Hello, I use the divi theme and got pages that were automatically generated with images. Is google going to penalise me because of those and consider it is thin content ? Should I remove those ? Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
Sale Pages On An eCommerce Website
I have a client who sells 50 brands of shoes. At the moment the developer has a noindex/nofollow tag on all sale pages which is wrong as around 10% of site activity revolves around those pages. The structure looks like this: 1. For Cats/Sub Cats site/sale
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Nigel_Carr
site/womens/sale
site/womens/shoe/sale
site/womens/shoes/ballerinas/sale For every cat/subcat - there are 10 cats and average 5 subcats per cat so 50 pages of sale. 2. For Brands site/brand
site/brand/womens
site/sale/brand
site/sale/womens/brand
site/sale/womens/cat/brand
site/sale/womens/cat/subcat/brand So each brand can have four sale pages on top of its own brand page. 50 brands x 54 = around 2700. Now no one is going to start writing 2700 pieces of additional on page content (although Meta is OK! ) and we risk further diluting the brand pages we need to show highly for, so we need to do something. Should we Category Pages: 1. Allow all sale cat and subcat pages to proliferate through Google? or
2. Canonicalise all sale sub category pages back to category
3. Caonicalise all category and Subcategory pages back to sale/womens Brand Pages: 1. Allow all sale brand pages to proliferate through Google ?
2. Canonicalise Sub Cat brand pages back to sale/category/brand
3. Canonicalise Sub Cat and Cat back to sale/brand Note the lower pages never do well in search. If you search a brand + Sale in Google it is always the site/brand page that comes up, never the sale version (This is from research on other similar sites and my own analysis) Same with Sub Cats - eg, Brand + Subcat - it's always site/brand that comes up first wand has the highest PA. Also we can't analyse any of these sale pages in MOZ or anywhere else as they are not in search at all having been no indexed. That's my conundrum for today, Any thoughts would be appreciated!0 -
SEO: How to change page content + shift its original content to other page at the same time?
Hello, I want to replace the content of one page of our website (already indexeed) and shift its original content to another page. How can I do this without problems like penalizations etc? Current situation: Page A
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | daimpa
URL: example.com/formula-1
Content: ContentPageA Desired situation: Page A
URL: example.com/formula-1
Content: NEW CONTENT! Page B
URL: example.com/formula-1-news
Content: ContentPageA (The content that was in Page A!) Content of the two pages will be about the same argument (& same keyword) but non-duplicate. The new content in page A is more optimized for search engines. How long will it take for the page to rank better?0 -
Links / Top Pages by Page Authority ==> pages shouldnt be there
I checked my site links and top pages by page authority. What i have found i dont understand, because the first 5-10 pages did not exist!! Should know that we launched a new site and rebuilt the static pages so there are a lot of new pages, and of course we deleted some old ones. I refreshed the sitemap.xml (these pages are not in there) and upload it in GWT. Why those old pages appear under the links menu at top pages by page authority?? How can i get rid off them? thx, Endre
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Neckermann0 -
Multi-Location SEO: Sites vs Pages
I just started with a new company that requires multi-location SEO for its niche product/service. Currently, we have a main corporate website, as well as, 40+ individual dealer websites (we host all). Keep in mind each of these dealers consist of only 1-2 people, so corporate I will be managing the site or sites and content strategy. Many of the individual dealer sites actually rank very well (#1-#3) in their areas for our targeted keywords, but they all use the same duplicate content. Also, there are many dealer sites that have dropped off the radar in last year, which is probably because of the duplicate and static content. So I'm at a crossroads... Attempt to redo all of these location sites with unique and local content for each or Create optimized unique pages for each of them on our main site and redirect their current local domains to their page on our site Any advise regarding which direction to go in and why. Why is very important. It will be very difficult to convince a dealer that is #1 with his local site that we are redirecting to our main site, so I need some good ammo and reasoning. Also, any tips toward achieving local seo success will be greatly appreciated, too! Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | the-coopersmith0 -
Articles | Posts or Pages
I'm looking to add a number of feature rich articles to educate, promote best practice and provide useful all round advice. My reasearch to date on the pros and cons have drawn me to writing articles as a page, as per
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mark_Ch
http://yoast.com/articles/wordpress-seo/#pagesvsposts My Question, etc.
I would like to get an outside opinion on the above. Additionally, how can you find out the site structure of a website.
i.e. what are blog posts or static pages0 -
2 pages lost page rank and not showing any backlinks in google
Hi we have a business/service related website, 2 of our main pages lost their page rank from 3 to 0 and are not showing any backlinks in google. What could be the possible reason. Please guide me.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Tech_Ahead0 -
How Bad is it to Not Have a Home Page?
The site I'm currently developing is far different than any other project I've every worked on in that search traffic is likely to represent only a very small percentage of the total traffic. Because of this, I want to make sure I optimize the site for the people clicking from Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc more so than the BIG G. I can't for the life of me think of a reason to have a home page other than for SEO purposes. I'd much rather throw the user directly into the experience than have him be distracted by a home page. At the same time, I'd like to salvage any search engine traffic that I can. My plan is to 301 redirect chucklebot.com/ to /funny-memes/SOME_RANDOM_IMAGE and then put the content of the current home page at /about. Does that kill any possibility of the site ranking well? Or can the subpages (eg /meme-generator) still rank well if they are properly optimized? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PatrickGriffith0