Page Speed & SERPS

[bronxpad]

What impact does page speed have on rankings in the search engine?

If I have a Site that is heavy with Pictures, Onsite videos and various scripts that would ultimately be of good use to a viewer but takes time to load.

VS

A Site that has pictures that are fully optimized for the web or eliminated to save on load time, Videos that are hosted on Sites like VIMEO or You Tube and eliminate scripts where possible and use css3. Note the site loads faster and is better for mobil but doesn't have the same feel of the first site but is useful to the user.

Now let's say that both sites are virtual twins in terms of their link profile, age, content quality, location and citations.

Will one rank better because of load time?

It's the quest for creating the ultimate site for users while delivering it within the fastest time possible.

[Zachary_Russell]

I want to start off by saying I'm a huge stickler for page load speed. Not only is it important to SEO but it is even more important for UX -- especially with bounce rate/conversion rate.

Again, this is all hypothetical, but if the two sites are identical in all other aspects, the page that has the fastest load time would rank better.

Just as a point of reference, using Vimeo/YouTube isn't the only other solution to making your site load faster. You can/should consider things like a CDN -- Especially for video if nothing else. Also, video itself shouldn't slow down page load time as the video itself shouldn't load until someone clicks the "play button"

[Zachary_Russell]

I want to start off by saying I'm a huge stickler for page load speed. Not only is it important to SEO but it is even more important for UX -- especially with bounce rate/conversion rate.

Again, this is all hypothetical, but if the two sites are identical in all other aspects, the page that has the fastest load time would rank better.

Just as a point of reference, using Vimeo/YouTube isn't the only other solution to making your site load faster. You can/should consider things like a CDN -- Especially for video if nothing else. Also, video itself shouldn't slow down page load time as the video itself shouldn't load until someone clicks the "play button"

[bronxpad]

Thank you for your response. What are the best ways to minimize page load times? What are the biggest offenders of page load times? Finally, what is CDN?

[DarinPirkey]

There was a Google Webmaster Blog Post back in 2010 talking about this so I would read up on it.

Basically, I personally don't feel a slower page will rank worse unless it's obviously super slow.  (ie, Flash or 5 second load times)  The key is that Google manages how it crawls your site depending on load time so that it doesn't take up too much of your server when it crawls.  So if your pages crawl faster, Google can crawl more of them at one time.

I have seen some of my sites rank faster when I did a few things to them to speed them up but I think it had more to do with on-page metrics and UX and not necessarily with load time.

Here are some pointers for your sites speed.

1. For pages that have a lot of photos (large ones especially) I would have those photos on another site and load it from there. Web browsers can load from multiple domains at the same time, saving a lot of load time

2. Make sure your css is in .css files and not embeded directly on each page (same goes for javascript and .js files)

3. Set up cache on your server.

To answer your question, I don't think one or the other will rank over the other because of load time.  But, remember, there is a point when your load time becomes to slow and the UX is hurt and therefore visitors don't stay on the page and leave.  That would hurt the rankings.

[DarinPirkey]

CDN- Content Delivery Network

[KevinBudzynski]

Good read on the subject => http://www.seomoz.org/blog/15-tips-to-speed-up-your-website

[MikeRoberts]

You might also want to check out https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/ to see if there are any suggestions Google can give you to make your site faster.

[TommyTan]

Hi,

All the answers are just amazing!  I just want to share my 2 cents on this topic.

If both sites have the same link juice, age, content quality, location and citations and only the load speed is different, I believe the site that loads faster will rank better.

In one of Google Webmasters Blog article, they mentioned that they are obsessed with load speed and do use Site Load Speed as a signal in their search ranking algorithms.  It may not weight heavily compared to other signals but for 2 virtual identical sites, the one that loads faster wins.

Furthermore, as Darin mentioned, if your site loads faster then Google will also be able to crawl more of your pages, if more pages are crawled, then more of your pages will have the chance of appearing on the search engine result page.

Also quoting from Google Webmaster Blog: "We encourage you to start looking at your site's speed (the tools above provide a great starting point) — not only to improve your ranking in search engines, but also to improve everyone's experience on the Internet."