Google Adds Page Load Speed to Ranking Algorithm
Google announced on Friday, April 9th, 2010 that it added page load speed to its all-important page-ranking algorithm. This move has been rumored for more than a year as Google ramped up an emphasis on speed with new product releases and focus like Chrome (its fast browser), SPDY (its new fast protocol for transporting web content) and pushes into ultra-fast broadband products. In this post we explain what this addition means, how Google determines speed, and what you can do to both test your page load speed and find ways to improve it.
We think adding page load speed into Google’s ranking system is a great addition to the list of items that Google considers in determining which pages should rank highly for keywords for primarily two reasons:
- Page load speed is incredibly important to user experience. Studies have shown that there is a subconscious clock ticking in a web surfer’s mind as he or she waitson a page to load. As Internet speeds have increased, the expectation of fast load time has also increased. Click here for a post from Google on its internal testing on speed and impact. Fast pages are good.
- Page load speed is something that developers can measure, monitor, and optimize. While there are many things in the Google Algorithm we have no control over, this is one of the items we can do something about. We’ve listed some tools below to help analyze page load speed and 6 tips for improving you page load speed to rank higher.
How does Google determine page load speed?
Two major methods are being used to assess page load speed:
- The page response to the GoogleBot. The GoogleBot is Google’s agent that crawls links all over the Web to categorize pages and content and then sends all of the information back to the Google mothership for processing using its proprietary algorithm. The GoogleBot is simply an information collector and doesn’t make any judgments or conduct analysis. It does, however, have some limits to how much of each page it will crawl because crawling billions of pages takes a lot of time. This is one reason we recommend having “clean” code, putting good content higher up on a page, and moving repetitive code like CSS to separate files.
- Load time as measured by the Google Toolbar. Google has been very aggressive in distributing and popularizing the use of its free toolbar. One of the reasons is Google’s ability to use the toolbar as a measurement platform for individual sites and pages.
Tools for Measuring Page Load Speed
There are many free tools and plug-ins for measuring the speed of your page load time. Here are a few of our favorites:
- If you have a Google Webmaster account (and you really should) there is a page speed tool in the Labs section. It gives you a general idea of how fast your pages load in relation to other pages on other sites that are measured.
- Page Speed – This is a plug-in for the Firebug/Firefox browsers that measures load performance of web pages and gives recommendations for improvement.
- YSlow – This is another Firebug/Firefox plug-in that looks at speed and provides recommendations
What the Change to the Algorithm Means to You
In terms of importance, improving the page load speed of your site is not as critical as creating good title tags, developing URL structure, unique page content, and high quality inbound links. (For more tips and steps to optimize you pages for SEO see our recent blog post “SEO Checklist: 10 tactics to rank higher” or sign up for Optify) The page speed will provide an advantage to pages where most other items are equal. There is no doubt that a faster page load will also improve user experience and result in changes like increasing numbers of visitors, reducing the bounce rate, and providing more page views per visit. Either way, it is a good idea to take a proactive stance towards improving page speed.
6 Tips for Improving Your Page Load Speed to rank Higher
- Optimize images : Large images can be cut-up, compressed, and loaded more quickly.
- Use background colors instead of images: Instead of loading a large background image, use a background color.
- Use caching: Caching provides repeat users with a better user experience as the images and other static files are loaded the first time someone visits the site and do not need to be loaded on subsequent visits.
- Load external Javascipt and object calls last: One of the worst things is to make your visitors wait for remote or synchronous content to load onto your pages. Set up the site so that your content loads first and then external content is loaded subsequently where possible.
- Use separate files for code that is repeated: Most commonly used with CSS style sheets, separate files allow the html code of the page to be lighter (less lines of code) and gives you a central, distinct file to make changes to important code (like style sheets).
- Use CSS styling instead of HTML tables to organize your webpage: Web browsers (IE, Firefox, etc.) wait to load all of the content of a table before loading the table. CSS makes this process faster (and easier to update).
What to do Next
- Pick one of the tools above and install it
- Run the page load test against your homepage, one category page, and a form page
- Get an idea of what elements can be improved. Discuss with your tech team and webmaster
- Run the same tests against a competitor’s set of pages to see how you compare.
I hope this helps you take the vital steps towards improving page load speed for your users and the search engines.
