How Does The Page Load Speed Affects Google Rankings

The major search engine Google uses many factors to determine the ranking of websites in search results. Three years back it announced that the loading speed of a website also has a great impact in search ranking.

The Google mantra is giving the fast and accurate information to its searchers. In case, your website loading speed is low, no one wish to visit your site again, since your site providing bad user experience.

As a result automatically your website ranking will be lower even though you have a valuable content.

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How does the Google measure the Page Load times?

Actually the Google receives the page/website loading speed from a variety of sources which includes Google Analytics, Google Chrome, Google Toolbar data and response times to googlebot.

In December, Google added a page speed report to Webmasters Tools in the “Labs” section. It shows how fast your site loads, specifically calls out several pages on your website and offer some suggestions to improve the page speed.

Where the Page Speed Fits in Google’s Algorithm?

As I already told Google has many factors to determine the page ranking, even though it didn’t announce about them publicly, the Matt Cutt says the website owners should not overestimate the impact of page speed on rankings. “Quality is the first and foremost concern on Google” he says.

How Fast are Google’s top 5 websites?

According to the data from Experian, almost 20% of clicks from Google Search engine result pages go to Amazon, Facebook, Yahoo, YouTube and Wikipedia. The Google’s Page speed tool are used to analyze how well the home pages of these sites are following the Google’s Page Speed best practices.

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The figures in the above picture reveals that these top 5 websites have more opportunities to improve their page load speeds. Google conducted research to determine the average page load speed and that can be used as a benchmark to determine the page speed of other websites. See the given below picture for reference.

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A study conducted by the Google reveals that “slowing down the search results page by 100 to 400 milliseconds has a considerable impact on the number of searches per user”. A one second delay will reduce the conversion rate by seven percent.

During study, 75% of users told that they would not return to a website that took longer than 4 seconds to load. Majority of the users expect to load a website or webpages within 2 seconds.

So, what to do to increase the Page Load Speed?

1. First Measure your website load speed:

This will give a idea from which you can start to improve the speed of your website. Many tools are available to measure the website load speed out of which mainly two tools namely Google Analytics Site Speed reports and Pingdom Page Load Time tool reveals the good result.

2. Upgrade the server:

So, once you know the loading time of your website it’s time to upgrade your server, if it has low speed. Hosting your site on the good server results the webpages to work faster.

In case, your website is hosted on a shared hosting account, then it is advisable to upgrade them to a Dedicated server or VPS server because it allows you to have more server resources available (i.e memory and CPU).

3. Opt your code and files:

Many server side codes like CSS/HTML/Javascript code are available to reduce your page load times; so utilize them well to improve your website speed.

Conclusion:

The page load speed impacts the conversion rate, site usability and the website user satisfaction. So, if your website loading time is slow immediately take the necessary action to improve its speed. If you followed all the guidelines provided by Google along with the loading speed automatically the page rank of your website will reach the high position in search results.