Importance of Website’s speed in search engine ranking

Website speed is now an important factor. When more than 70% of users are browsing the web from their mobile phones, page load time matters. In this post, I will discuss why the website’s speed and load time is important for search engine ranking and improving organic traffic.

What do I mean by website speed?

Website speed is the amount of time a website takes on complete loading on the user’s web browser. As an internet user, I like those websites which open fast. I hate to wait for a website to load slowly. And I am sure you also do the same.

Many times when a user searches for a query on Google or any other search engine and clicks on a search result to navigate to a web page, he wants to get the instant result for his query. But what if a website takes too much time to load. The user will click back and click on another result. This is the strategy used by most internet users including me. This is the reason the load time of your website matters if you really want to acquire more organic traffic.

Many of us think that using a good web hosting service is enough to make our website load faster on the user computer. But I do not think that it is enough. You have to make your website faster by testing various things. Google has given the Pagespeed tool to check what is causing issues and taking a long time.

Your users will have a significantly better experience if your site has a faster load time. Users do not want to wait for more for a website to load. So Google started giving this importance in finding relevant search results. Google announced this via a post on Google webmaster central blog.

Google’s Matt Cutts has stated that, “We want the web to be faster, we want sites to load quickly”, so it’s very possible that Google could be looking to encourage and reward this through their ranking of sites.

It means a website that loads slowly will have some negative points on search engine ranking thus affecting search ranking because of slow speed. In some studies conducted by Google, their findings revealed that if a website loads 100 to 400 milliseconds slower than normal, the user will most likely decrease the amount of usage and time on each individual visit to that particular site. If your site is slower than a competitor’s website, you are at the risk of losing business solely based on load time.

Back in 2010, Google started using web page load time as a ranking factor for desktop searches. In July 2018, Google also started using load time as a ranking factor for mobile searches.

Google has already confirmed that the load time of a page is a ranking factor on mobile sites. So, it wants you to improve the load time. Google has also begun AMP results to give lightning-fast results on mobile devices. If you are a WordPress user, you can implement AMP on WordPress to get a better ranking on mobile results.

So it’s time to think about your Website speed again. Because the most important visitors are those who come from organic search results. And if you are losing your search engine ranking, you are going to face a great loss. So take the necessary steps to improve your Website speed. You can consider adding caching, optimizing images, compressing CSS/JS, and using the CDN service. If you are a WordPress user, you can read our WordPress Speedup guide.

How to check website load time?

There are various online tools available that let you check the loading time of your website from various locations. I personally use Pingdom to check the load time of my website. This tool not only displays the load time but also breaks down the load time of each and individual component of your website.

You should also try the Pagespeed tool to check your website’s page speed score and try to improve it. It should be more than 75. try to get as better as possible.

These are a few other tools you should try

• Firebug
• Moz Crawl Test
• YSlow
• WebPageTest.org

Is using a responsive theme well?

Most of us use responsive themes but I don’t think it works well on mobile devices. While it offers a good experience, it loads the whole page. It is better if we try a separate mobile version that has fewer components and focuses only on the main content. In this way, we will be able to reduce the page size on a mobile device. In this case, AMP works well and you will not have to set up a mobile site.

If you think your website’s theme is slow, you can try good WordPress themes. I recommend a few premium themes clubs that offer fast, SEO optimized and responsive WordPress themes.