When it comes to SEO webmasters often neglect page load time. However, with users getting faster and faster internet connections, people expect pages to load pretty much instantly. Thus Google ranks slow loading websites lower than those that load faster. Let’s discuss some methods of getting that load time down, what an acceptable load time is, and some good tools to measure your website’s performance.
What’s Google say?
As of 2010, Google tweaked their algorithm to factor in how fast a website loads. Previously many SEOs focused on techniques like building quality links, social profiles, banner advertising, and on site optimizations such as meta tags. However, page load time is a critical factor in how well your website ranks. Granted only 1% of searches are actually effected by load time, but the sites that are effected see massive differences. There are many credible reports from large websites who were hit after the algorithm change who had slow loading sites. After these sites fixed their website’s speed, some saw as much as a 40% increase in traffic. You might then be wondering what an acceptable time. It’s a pretty complicated answer and doesn’t have a clear answer. Independent studies have been done and found that a page that takes longer than three seconds to load both lowers conversation ratios and increases bounce rate. There is no magic number to take away from this, it depends on your content, users, and what you think is appropriate for your website. Personally I like to try and keep it under two seconds.
What can I do to lower it?
- There are a number of things you can do to get that load time down. Most of them are fairly straight forward and involve very little work.
- Optimizing your images is by far the most common sense tactic when approaching this problem. Use JPG images when animation and transparency aren’t required and save them in an editor that allows you to adjust the quality. For Windows use Paint.NET and for Linux use Pinta. Use anywhere from 65-85% quality, which should reduce your images to under 100kb for larger images (800×600 @ 85%).
- If you’re using WordPress, there are quite a few plugins that allow you to cache your website. The most popular is W3 Total Cache which is recommended by Google Spokesmen Matt Cutts. This plugin is great for your average website, or one that is under heavy load.
- The order in which you place JavaScript and CSS also play a roll on how fast your page loads. CSS should be put at the top of your HTML, while JavaScript should be put at the bottom. This gets your page rendering before the browser start executing JavaScript code.
- All of your JavaScript and CSS code should also be in external files. This allows the browser to cache them whereas it would download them each time the page is called if you place them directly in the HTML.
- If you can combine all your JavaScript in one file and all your CSS in another, it’s highly recommended. Each time you request a new file you are adding precious milliseconds to the load time.
- 301 redirects might be a necessary evil if you need to forward users to different pages. However, each forward will add anywhere from 50-200ms, so be conscious of how much you use them.
Tools to track load time
There are two tools that come to mind if you want to measure your load time, Pingdom and Web Page Test. They both provide similar data and graphs and are free to use. Each of them displays how long it took to load every request on the page. This allows you to see which files or images in particular are taking a long time to load. Pingdom gives a little more detail about how long was spent waiting, connecting, receiving, querying the DNS server, and on SSL if applicable. Another thing I like about Pingdom is it gives you grades on different improvements you could make to leverage a faster website. For instance, my combining of JS and CSS files earned me a 100%, but my failure to leverage browser caching earned me a 65%. In total it grades you on a total of twelve things and gives you a total grade. This score is saved for that particular website and can be accessed even months later. You can build a graph of your improvements or bottlenecks with the history graph.
