How Your Website’s Speed affects it’s SEO ranking | Storm Internet

How long your website takes to load affects a variety of things from how many visitors stay on your site to how highly your site ranks in Google. In this article we’ll look at some experiments done by Google that show that 0.5 second delay in page load speed can reduce traffic by 20% and how you can increase your website’s speed.

Would you wait an extra second for one of your favorite websites to load?

How about two seconds?

More?

The Google Test

Google ran a test where they purposely slowed down the Google homepage from 100 milliseconds to 400 milliseconds. Immediately they saw a decrease in the number of Google searches from 0.2%-0. 6%. Not only that, but the data showed that even after Google sped their site back up to it’s normal loading speed, searches continued to decrease for the next 30 days!

And that’s Google, the single most important most used website on the entire Internet.

Imagine what a slowdown could do to your business’s website?

Based on the results of this text, and how quickly Google saw an affect on the user experience (UX) of the website, Google announced that they will be amending their rankings algorithm to include speed. This is one of the only times Google has publicly commented on what affects a website’s ranking, and confirms the suspicions of certain SEO experts who have long maintained that for UX reasons speed factors into a site’s Google ranking.

Further Experiments

Google uses it’s aptly named Googlebots to determine exactly how long a page takes to respond and load. But it’s not just Google, A study done by Akamai showed that 75% of people will not come back to website if it took longer than 4 seconds for it to load. Furthermore the companies that spend more money on their websites and advertising prioritize speed as well. Further insights from the study released by Akamai revealed that 47% of Internet users expect a website to load in less than 2 seconds, with 40% abandoning a website if it doesn’t load that fast.

One of the major factors in how fast your website loads is your server capabilities. When you host with Storm rather than in-house, you will notice that your site loads faster with smoother load times. The Google test has proven that speed has a real effect on your search ranking, so you want to make sure that you have servers that run as fast as possible.

As of the time of this writing it’s unclear exactly what percentage of search queries are affected by site speed right now, but there are a variety of tools available from Google to test your site’s speed, so you can get an idea of exactly how fast your website is.

Now that you know that a slow loading site can cost you traffic and Google ranking slots, let’s discuss some ways that you can speed up your website’s loading times.

5 ways to speed up your website’s loading times!

• Get better hosting. Your website’s hosting is a major factor in how fast your website loads, you want to make sure that you research the best hosting solutions out there. If you have great hosting and your site still isn’t fast enough to avoid losing visitors consider trying a content delivery network or CDN especially if you have an international audience. A CDN is great for international audiences because it delivers content based on servers closest to the user, avoiding any lag that might result waiting for servers across the globe.
• Optimize your images. Image files are extremely large and this means that the data takes longer to get through servers and end up on the visitor’s computer screen. It’s important to have great images on your website, so in order to keep your site running and loading smoothly you need to optimize your images before uploading them. There are a variety of programs for optimizing images such as Photoshop, and Pixlr. In general you are going to need to shrink the images and reduce the quality to about 60-80% of the original in order to use it online.
• Minify your code. Complicated files with CSS, Javascript, or HTML make your servers have to work harder and result in a slower loading website. An easy way to clear out some of this unnecessary code is to do what’s called minifying. There are a variety of different programs to minify your code depending on what platform your site is built on.
• Cache your page often. Using browser caching stores cached versions of various resources which is a process that will speed up your website and reduce on server lag. By caching you will save a ton of requests to your server ensuring it runs faster and more smoothly.
• Use CSS sprites to combine images. Images are one of the most common sources of website slow downs. If you have a lot of images on your site you are making your server go back and forth to get all of the requested resources. Sprites allow you to combine several images into a single image which saves the server extra work and makes your site run faster.

In this article we discussed the importance of a website that loads quickly and smoothly. We talked about the Google experiment which showed that not only does a slower website lead to less website traffic but that it leads to less website traffic for up to 5 weeks! You also learned that almost 50% of people will not wait 2 seconds for a website to load with over 40% abandoning websites that don’t load this quickly.

After that we discussed 5 different ways that you can make sure your website runs quickly and smoothly ranging from getting a better host company to using CSS sprites to combine images. You know your website needs to load faster and you now have the tools to make that happen.

If you’d like super-fast hosting for your web site, talk to us at Storm by clicking here or calling us on 0800 817 4727. We’ve been providing ultra fast, secure web hosting services since 2004 and know a thing or two about optimising servers and sites for speed.