Does Page Load Time Affect SEO Rankings?

[HMCOE]

I was curious about how much page load times affect rankings. Here's what I did:

• I put together a lot of interactive media on specific landing pages
• Time-on-Page from organic visitors went from 50 seconds to average of 34 minutes
• Bounce Rate decreased by 20%
• Page Load time increased from 1 second to 6 seconds and at peak times to 8 seconds (on 56KB test)
• In the meantime the page was re-indexed and re-cached

My question is three-fold:

• Would the time on page give higher rankings for keyword
• Would decreased bounce rate enhance rankings?
• Would the page load time decrease rankings?

Did anyone do a similar test? What were the results?

[Christy-Correll]

Yes, page load time is a ranking factor. Optimizing pages so they load quickly is listed as a best practice in Google's Webmaster Guidelines. So yes, increased page load load time may decrease rankings. It should definitely decrease traffic. Eight seconds is a looong time these days to wait for a page to load! Have you seen any changes in the SERPs since making these changes?

On the positive side, you must have some fantastic content if users are willing to wait that long for a page to load -- and stay on it for over half an hour I am curious, are you having a lot of repeat traffic?

No, bounce rates do not affect rankings. Matt Cutts has said that if a user visits only one page on a site and finds the information they need, this is a positive user experience. High bounce rates aren't positive for every site, don't get me wrong. If you have an ecommerce site for shoes and you have a very high bounce rate, meaning customers aren't browsing your offerings, writing reviews, and going through checkout, you aren't likely selling very many shoes on the site. The bounce rate is measured in GA to give you the information you need to analyze your site performance in this regard, not for the purpose of ranking your site.

Increased time on page correlates with increased user engagement. Users engage with, and engage longer, with quality content. Or at least highly entertaining content While it is not as clear-cut as to weather this is a ranking factor as is the case for page load time, Google is measuring it and they are all about rewarding websites that provide a great user experience, right?

[AlanBleiweiss]

To add to Christy's well written and quite accurate response, page load time has been a key factor since Panda first rolled out. It may have been a factor before this, however Panda is when it first really took hold as a clear, change = results measure.  For example, I have had numerous audit clients who had severe page load problems, and several of those have seen increased rankings and resulting traffic from organic listings solely by resolving page load speed.

In one client situation, simply by changing site templates (and resulting load speeds), the client saw a doubling of organic traffic literally overnight.  To then test that this was the cause, he then did the same thing with a completely different site that had a completely different model and also saw traffic dramatically increase literally overnight.

However, given the complexity of SEO in 2012, with so many other factors, if there are other serious flaws to the SEO, just increasing page load speeds may not get the same results I've described.

Bounce rates CAN negatively impact rankings, but not purely as a stand-alone factor.  It's when someone comes to your site, can't find what they're looking for, then returns to Google and then clicks to another site and does not then come back to Google.  Which is also the case even if they didn't initially bounce on first landing on your site. They could also have spent more time, or visited more pages before returning to Google to re-search.

[HMCOE]

20% is repeat traffic. 80% is new. In past 2 weeks impressions increased around 30-35% and the only thing I can attribute the change to is the interactive stuff.

I have what you may call a niche market. All the competitors out there are focusing on selling products, we're offering a service on top of education. In many cases we're sharing the stuff the product companies would never want clients to know.

But it doesn't hurt to be prepared once other competitors arise, and I'm sure they're coming.

It would be good to find out about the correlation of Time on Page vs. Rankings from others that have tested this.

I'll be sure to post an update in a couple of weeks.