Google announced last year with little fanfare that speed was going to become one of the new criteria for determining search rank. Matt Cutts, the Google guru, was quick to point out that this is not a dramatic change for businesses. He said that they would not be weighing speed as much as some of the traditional criteria that we are used to. This may be, but more and more I have noticed that our fast sites seem to rank better than our slower sites. I think it might make sense to take a closer look at speed and try to understand how Google considers speed when it comes to selling ads, which is one of their primary motivators.
Site speed reflects how quickly a website responds to web requests. This can have a big impact on user experience and, more importantly for Google, how long people stay on the site. The longer a user stays on a site the more exposure to targeted ads they have. Google is motivated to have the user find a content rich site. A content rich site with low bounce rate provides a captive audience; or as Google puts it officially: "Faster sites create happy users"
But how much can a few seconds of load time truly affect user experience? Several sources mention an Aberdeen study which states that adding just one second of load time equals a 7% loss in conversions 11% fewer views and a 16% decrease in customer satisfaction. "According to studies by the Aberdeen Research Group, the industry average is 97.8% availability. Not bad right? Wrong. Consider what a two percent lack of availability really looks like: it means your site is out of business 8 days a year. For an ecommerce site generating $100,000 a day, that translates into a loss of $800,000 in yearly revenue."
Source: www.gomez.com
source: www.seo-e.com
These numbers are dramatic enough to make people pay attention, and from our perspective speed can't really be ignored. In a very un-official study, we took two Wordpress blogs from the same client. Both were similarly coded and both had content that was created using the same methodology. We hosted one blog using a service here in Austin called WP Engine which specializes in super fast WordPress hosting and put the other blog on regular hosting with Inmotion, a service we host our own site. We are responsible to report monthly to our client but check traffic and keyword ranking consistently. What we have found is that the site hosted by WP Engine that was focused on speed performs markedly better in both traffic and search-ability. I contacted WP Engine about the results and The Founder, Jason Cohen was not surprised: "Google loses 20% of their traffic for each additional 100 milliseconds it takes a page to load. Google also incorporates your page-load time into your site's search rankings. Faster sites win, literally."
At that point I made the business decision to make the pricier move to a host provider focused on not just downtime and customer service, but on speed as well. There are tools you can use to test your site today and see how your site stacks up:
- Page Speed, an open source Firefox/Firebug add-on that evaluates the performance of web pages and gives suggestions for improvement.
- YSlow, a free tool from Yahoo! that suggests ways to improve website speed.
- WebPagetest shows a view of your pages' load performance plus an optimization checklist.
- In Webmaster Tools, Site Performance shows the speed of your website as experienced by users around the world.
So how much does speed matter? I think more than Google lets on. The bottom line is just one second of load time may make a huge difference, and if your site takes over three seconds to load you may take yourself out of the game entirely. For our purpose of getting our clients exposure, speed definitely matters.