Is There an SEO Benefit for Faster Loading Pages?

Will Your Site Rank Higher If It's Faster?

There's been mumblings in the search engine community that Google is getting ready to release a caffeine update to its search engine algorithms that will provide a rankings benefit for sites that have faster loading pages. Is it true? Probably. Here's why.

Matt Cutts Speaks Out on Website Speed

Matt Cutts, Google's voice for SEO, has been quoted a saying the following: "a lot of people within Google think that the web should be fast. It should be a good experience, and so it's sort of fair to say that if you're a fast site, maybe you should get a little bit of a bonus. If you really have an awfully slow site, then maybe users don't want that as much."

Makes sense to us - no one wants to sift through a bunch of results that take an eternity to load. Statistics show that the longer a site takes to load, the more likely a user is to leave it before it loads. As a rule of thumb, if your page doesn't load up within a few seconds, chances are you'll lose the visitor. If the top pages in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) all take forever to load, it will prove a huge inefficiency and inconvenience to searchers, and may ultimately impact the reliability and reputation of the search engine hosting the results. So it's in Google's interest to rank faster loading pages higher.

Google's Coffee Update - Will It Affect Your Website?

First off, we are anticipating that the search ranking benefit of a faster site will be marginal at best. That is, if two sites have more or less the same quality of content and link reputation, the faster site will be given priority in the rankings. But a super fast site that is loaded with junk will not see much of a rankings boost by this update.

How to Speed up Your Website

There are several things you can do to optimize the loading of your website pages. Google has a whole section on its coding website dedicated to this, entitled Let's Make the Web Faster. When you first visit the page, you'll be greeted with: "What would be possible if browsing the web was as fast as turning the pages of a magazine? We invite you to join us in exploring and innovating across the entire spectrum of performance — from Internet protocols to the browser to website development. Together, let's make the web faster!"

Following this you'll see Learn, Participate, and Explore sections that help you learn about website speed, how it may affect your website, and links to tools you can use to improve your web page performance.

Using Firefox Firebug/ Page Speed

We use a Google plugin for the Firefox web browser, called Page Speed, to measure the speed in which our pages load. It's part of the Firebug developer's package that helps you troubleshoot and analyze the loading of your pages on the Web. Google says it best with their little blurb on why to use Page Speed:  *

• Make your site faster.
• Keep Internet users engaged with your site.
• Reduce your bandwidth and hosting costs.
• Improve the web!

After installing Page Speed, you'll be able to see how fast your page loads, and will receive an overall score from 0-100. Load popular sites such as Google, Amazon, Ebay, and others in Page Speed to compare how quickly your website loads compared with other industry benchmarks. Below is an example screenshot of Page Speed for Guru of Search:

Here you can see our overall score (for a randomly selected page on the website): 85/100. Simply visit different pages on your site and click "refresh analysis" to get new scores. One of the most important pages you'll want to measure page speed for is your front page.

Below the score, you can see all kinds of statistics, pass or fail scores, along with suggestions on what you can do to optimize your website speed. Click the "+" icon next to each item for details.

What's Your Page Speed Score?

Want to share your Page Speed score with Guru of Search? Comment below with your page speed score and the URL of the page you used to get the score. We'll give a shout out to the fastest Page Speed.