Comments on: Do Page Load Times Affect Your Search Rankings?

By: Google’s Usability Fixation Reveals Local Ranking Factors

Google’s Usability Fixation Reveals Local Ranking Factors — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 12:01:44 +0000

[...] extension for measuring and diagnosing web page load times, I theorized that Google likely would use page load time as a ranking factor for natural search results. Later in the year, Google provided a Site performance interface in [...]

By: Google Shows Us How to Go Faster | Search Commander Blog - Scott Hendison

Google Shows Us How to Go Faster | Search Commander Blog - Scott Hendison — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 18:36:12 +0000

[...] made by Matt Cutts that they now were. Am I a heretic? Hardly – others had been saying the same thing for a while [...]

By: Matt Commins

Matt Commins — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 19:09:14 +0000

I’ve also noticed when load times are longer crawl rates drop significantly. I also seen drops in conversion rates for my PPC campaigns when load times increase by a couple of seconds. My best practice is all web pages should load in under 10 seconds, preferably 5 seconds.

By: SEO consultant

SEO consultant — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 05:43:59 +0000

It is in adwords where loading time is one of the algo to improve quality score. Code cleaning, PNG image, CSS, play important role for loading optimization.

By: Brandon Tran

Brandon Tran — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 11:06:41 +0000

Css, Images, from what I have seen are some of the minor issues in load time these days. I’m seeing coding effect load time more than anything. Large java libraries, wordpress type plugins are especially bad when the site owner installs many of them which can cause sites to drag.

By: silver

silver — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 20:22:38 +0000

That’s a good point, Andrew!

I neglected to mention that in the video, Matt states that page load times are not currently used for scoring pages for rankings, but he *did* state that if the page is too slowly returned it could timeout, causing Googlebot to be unable to index the page — which would affect a site’s presence in the search index!

And I agree with your experience — sluggish sites = reduced traffic.

By: Andrew Shotland

Andrew Shotland — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 18:13:06 +0000

chris, despite what Google says it has been my experience that when page load time increases, organic traffic goes down. In particular the # of pages crawled goes down so a page that does not crawled either may not get indexed or if it is already in the index it might start to age and get less competitive.

Regardless of the SEO implications, in my experience a slow page load typically goes hand in hand with a sub par user experience. So you may be able to get the traffic but it won’t stick around.