Page load speed?

[pauledwards]

Hi everyone, hope you've all had a good new years celebration.

Just a quick one on page load speed? how important do you think it is to organic rankings, especially on competitive terms?

Any tips on improving it? do i need to improve just the landing page im trying to rank or every page as its looked at as a qualtiy score as a whole?

Kind Regards,

[RobertFisher]

I think if the page is "slow" it will have a negative effect if for no other reason than some people will not wait for it to load. The question is, what is slow? For me, I like a page to load within two seconds or less. This is certainly not fast, but I don't think it is slow in terms of the engines.

The biggest issues we see that effect page load speed are failure to use expires headers, too many http requests, etc. We use Yslow on any site to check for things we can speed up. It will tell you where the site is slow (Cause and solution) which makes it easy for anyone. YSlow is a free download and works on Chrome and FireFox for sure.

[Sebes]

According to Matt Cutts page load speed is not as important as a ranking factor as one may think.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3zmP0W26M0  old video, there is a newer one from 2011 which i cannot find

Regarding the usefulness of page load speed: I heard about tests run by amazon and google that more or less lead to the conclusion that 1% faster meant 1% more revenue (to be taken with a grain of salt). But it is obvious that really fast pages produce more pageviews (and ultimately more ad-revenue etc.) and also increasing your sites user metrics (time on site, avg PI ...).

Some tips: go over every element and ask yourself whether you really need that element.

As Robert stated I would aim for a average page on an average domain to load between 1,5s and 2s.

Good ressources are:

www.webpagetest.org

Googles own Tool "PageSpeed"

[RobMay]

Page and site load speed/time is a factor as Matt has said in the past. It's beginning to take more effective value in the 'user experience' which Google is trumpeting in past months.

I would surely aim to analyze and look over the data you need to see the value in taking the time to start correcting issues with regards to your site speed and load times.

Yslow is a great tool for sure, but you can also download a chrome AP called 'SEO Site Tools', which has some great features to determine things like this. I would also look to incorporate Gzip into your site for compression.

You might also want to look at the file size of the homepage. If it exceeds 30kb, it's probably too large, and taking more time than needed to call the HTTP requests for various CSS, JS scripts, images, etc..

Just some more things too look at Cheers.