S
o, a few weeks ago Google announced that Page Speed is now a ranking factor. But what does that mean to the real world website owners and seos out there? Should you be worried or is it something not to worry about? Well here at SearchQuest we’ve been monitoring our clients rankings and trying to relate that to the page speed of the particular site. What we’ve noticed is, in all honesty, very little.
From what Google have told us the page speed ranking factor shouldn’t affect most sites out there and it is more of a quality score than a relevance factor. In “street” terms, if you’re site’s page speed isn’t extremely slow then you won’t be affected in the rankings. However, when it comes to site speed, rankings are not the main issue; user experience is! And what Google have done here is very sneakily highlighted the importance of site speed for general usability.
Page Speed Tools for you to Use
Google have also gone the extra mile and released some tools to help us SEOs figure out what elements are making a page load too slowly. There are plenty of other tools out there for you to check out as well, all of which make figuring out how to improve your site’s page load a doddle.
From Google:
From the rest of the WWW:
YSlow – Yahoo’s Web Developer Page Speed Tool
PageTest – Web Page Performance Test
In Conclusion
Page speed has always been important and should be something a webmaster is aware of mainly because of visitor experience and usability. If a page loads slowly then you might miss that sale because the customer leaves, that has always been the case. But, Google have made a clever little move here which has brought that issue to the forefront. By making page speed a ranking factor this has forced webmasters, Seos and hosting companies to re-evaluate website performance.
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Great seo/page speed article, thanks. Btw. I totally love this custom theme, it’s really nice to see a company not going for the usual free themese.
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