SEO Blog

The issue of page load time probably seems about as detached as you could probably get from traditional SEO, or at least it will if you have missed the recent news emanating from Google HQ. Yes, site speed is about to become a ranking factor.

As with any ranking factor, site speed will now come under the broader search engine optimisation umbrella. Now that a slow page load could be detrimental to other SEO efforts, it is essential that any issues are identified and corrected to ensure you don’t suffer a drop in rankings.

Site speed is only one of well over 100 ranking factors (in fact most would say that there are over 200), so it how important or to what extent it will actually determine positions on Google SERPs. But whilst it won’t be the most important factor, that doesn’t mean that it should be ignored.

So what can you do if your website is on the slow side? Well first you need to find out just how slow it is in comparison to your rivals. Google Webmaster Tools now provides a site speed test, which will allow you to find out exactly what shape you’re currently in and will show you how many competitors are performing better. This will at least give you a decent starting point and allow you to chart your progress.

Your page load time is often determined by a number of individual factors. Often though, it is down to the amount of clutter held within your site. For example you may have any amount of broken HTML code still populating the site. Whilst this will only make a negligible difference, when it comes to optimisation, every little helps. There are a number of programs available that will automatically clean up you HTML if you don’t feel able to do so yourself; although many will charge for the software/service.

Images are also a major sticking point. If you’ve got dozens on any one page you’re likely to be slowing down the speed with which it is able to load. If you have used HTML coding to reduce your image sizes, consider going back and editing these offline. This is for the simple fact that whilst the image is smaller, it still has the same resolution due to the fact that it has only been scaled down. Remove any offending images and resize them elsewhere before re-uploading.

You don’t have to load all your images at once either. You can code in a delay command that will only load the pictures visible to the visitor and will delay all others until they scroll down the page. Again this coding is freely available and may help eke out a few more milliseconds.

Also check your site server host. It might sound a little obvious, but if you aren’t on a dedicated server, your performance could be undermined by external issues.

There are so many things that you can do, but essentially you need to ensure that your site is as clean as possible. Broken JavaScripts and flawed coding could be holding back performance and ruining your visitors’ online experience. If you want to improve your SEO performance and user satisfaction, make sure you get your site up to speed.