Does a loading homepage animation effect rankings?

[roberthseo]

Our website ( panphoenix dot com) has a Javascript animation when you load it for the first time which takes just over 2 seconds to load. Does having this animation effect rankings negatively? Would appreciate your thoughts!Thanks

Rob

[TomRayner]

Hi Rob

The JS script will increase the load time of the page, but it might not be too bad.

What I'd suggest you do is input the URL into this tool.

This will measure the speed of your site and the individual elements, including that bit of JS script.  From there you can measure whether it is effecting your site speed too much.

If it is, there are a couple of things you could try to do.  You could try loading the script from the footer, so that the rest of the page load isn't delayed while waiting for the script.  You can also minify some of the JS code, reducing its size and therefore time to load.  JSMin is a good free tool that helps you do this.

Hope this helps.

[DougRoberts]

Slow loading pages (even with a loading animation) can frustrate visitors and cause them to bounce. If people are clicking on your site in the SERPS and then bouncing straight back to the search results again, picking another result, then this could be a signal to google that your site isn't relevant to the searcher..

How big an impact this might have, I don't know.

Do you get much search traffic to this one page site? How many search terms are you getting traffic from? There aren't a lot of words on the page...

From a user experience point of view, it may be worth looking at the impact the loading animation is having on your site. Can you track the bounce rate? (Are you capturing the visit before the page loads?)

Can you find a way to remove the need to have a loading animation? Is it something you can test?

As a side note - your text is unreadable! You might also want to look at what happens when someone visits without javascript enabled, and with css disabled (javascript enabled, using firefox) I can't scroll down the page  - which may indicate some accessibility issues.

[Highland]

Google is not going to render the animations, nor your loading image. So in terms of spidering, that shouldn't be a big deal.

The site seemed to be relatively fast in loading but I noticed you're not using a CDN to load all that extra content. I would highly recommend moving all that off to something like Amazon CloudFront. That should help your load times some.

Your site uses HTML5 so you might want to look into asynchronously loading some of your scripts. I noticed in Firebug that several scripts spent a long time being blocked (notably some Google scripts I didn't recognize)