Yes, Page Speed Matters

And yet you still see sites with a high Alexa ranking that show a page load speed of very slow… 🙁
Nevertheless I am off to check my webmaster tools 🙂

I usually run YSlow on sites and/or PageSpeed. They both help with tips on boosting load times. I like sites with fast loading pages, so the Googlebot should too 😉

Improved page speed not only affects the traffic to the site, but also significantly lowers the Bounce rate

Hmmm… I believe speed does matter, but I’m not sure these graphs prove the point. My main objection is that what you’ve got here is the speed at which Google downloads a page and this is different than the speed at which a page is rendered for a user. I believe it is the second speed measure that Google cares about with regards to usability.

Andrew,

Did the improved bot download time increase indexation i.e. did content get indexed that was previously not indexed?

Sorry, I don’t mean to be argumentative. Just trying to get as complete a picture as I can 🙂

I’m trying to learn all this and have been reading up on your website. I read the previous comment that a quicker load time reduces bounce rates and I think I would have to agree. I had a lot of scripts running on my site and it wasn’t performing as well, and saw a higher bounce rate in Google Analytics for that month. I removed some of the issues, and cleaned it up a bit. Quicker load time seemed to help.

Andrew, what’s the accuracy? And what exactly have you done to speed up? Have there been other changes too? I’ve never seen such a huge difference with only optimizing speed. I have seen it only in combination with other technical optimisations.

Very interesting. More testing might be in order though. I have no doubt speed can effect rankings… but just how much is the question.

@Jo Shaer, Alexa’s measure of page speed is, in my experience, pants. It has as much to do with the location of the toolbar audience and their connection speeds as it does with any objective measures.

Pieter – the only change in the site over this time period was improving performance. While it doesn’t work 100% of the time I have seen it work enough to know that with large sites their is a pretty good correlation between page speed and long tail rankings

Of course page speed matters. I agree 100%. I’m off to deep dive into my Webmaster Tools. Thanks for some cool insight!

Hey,

This is something we’re struggling with daily. Is there a way to increase page speed without upgrading servers? I’ve minimized usages of plugins and the like already. Is there anything else I can do?

Nice post. I really do agree that page speed matters. There are of course many ways to increase your page speed. Thanks for this cool post.

I suggest using a third party for testing page speed because Webmaster Tools are unreliable and Google states as much. Search Google for page speed tools, plenty of free stuff out there. You’ll probably see a massive difference in the reports from what Google produces.

By bot load time do you mean loading just the html?

Another concern I have is that the bots are in the USA so internationally hosted websites will get punished for nothing. But them I heard the WMT data is based on toolbar data gathering.

I’m still trying to get my head around the load data we can gather. My personal website seems to load quickly but I see data saying it’s slow.

I’m on the other side of the world so the bots may think it’s slow.

Even Analytics page speed data filtered for where it’s hosted still indicates its slow. One thought is that Analytics speed is based on when all the async social network javascript components have loaded.

As my traffic is very international I’ve started playing with using Content Delivery Networks (CDN). So far I’ve not seen any improvements in stats.