October 11, 2008 by Eddy Philipe
People keep asking us about the loading speed of their sites. Does it matter, in terms of SEO, that they aren’t on the fastest server in the world? Should they dust off their wallet pay to upgrade to a super server?
This is one of those complicated questions, but here goes; according to Google, load times do not matter in terms of ranking. However, if your site often takes a long time to load, Google could assign your site a diminished crawling priority. Remember, Google have billions of pages to inspect every month, you really shouldn’t keep the spider waiting.
Even if Google aren’t discriminating against slow pages already they may well do so in the future. Why? Because it makes sense to do so. Google’s ability to catalogue the web is not infinite – they will eventually make sure they’re allocating resources properly.
What we know for certain is that Google Adwords does factor load time into its quality score. This means that Google have the mechanism in place to discriminate against slow loading sites right now. It’s not too hard to imagine them rolling this technology out across the entire company.
Another, perhaps more important, reason to worry about your site loading slowly has nothing to do with Google. I’m talking, of course, about your users’ experience. You’re in a competitive market place – if your site is dawdling there’s absolutely nothing stopping that potential customer from navigating away to your competitor. Think about it, how many times have you done that yourself?
In short, fretting about load speed is very valid. Upgrade to the best server you can afford and take steps to optimise your site for speed. You’ll avoid annoying the two groups you need most, Google and your customers.
Related posts:
