How Does Website Speed Impact Your Search Ranking?

Ever been put off of a site because it suffers from abysmal load times? This is an issue worth noting when creating your Miami website; depending on the severity of your load times, a user could become frustrated and perhaps even stop visiting your site altogether.

We are entering an age where speed and convenience are synonymous with success. Google actually observed that slower pages lead to an inferior user experience, and this observation prompted them in 2010 to include page load times in their search engine algorithm. Since this change, Google has ranked slower sites notably lower than faster ones.

How Much Bearing Does Speed Have on Ranking?

Google understandably keeps their algorithms secret to avoid exploitation. The only thing that can be said with certainty is that speed matters. We can safely assume that proper meta tags, web content, and backlinks are still more impactful, but speed shouldn’t be discounted either.

Different Kinds of Website Speed

There are two different types of website speed to take into account: The “document complete” speed and the “fully rendered” speed.

Whenever you can interact with a site despite it not being fully loaded, you are encountering the “document complete” stage. The “document complete” speed is the time you wait from when you click a link to when you are able to interact with the page. On the other hand, “fully rendered” speed is how long the user must wait to see the page in its entirety.

Why is speed Important?

Most of us have experienced the frustration of loading a slow website. Google’s corporate staff also noticed that sending users to slower websites could annoy them and even cause them to use Google less; therefore slow load times are bad for Google’s business and, by extension, your Miami business.

Even if SEO wasn’t impacted by slow load times, this trend that Google has noticed shows the negative implications of a slow site. A slower site could annoy potential consumers and drive away business while a faster site can have the opposite effect.

For example, there was a case study where a shopping site called Shopzilla reduced their page load times by three seconds. As a result, the site saw a 25% increase in page views in addition to a 7-12% boost in revenue. Clearly faster load times mean faster profits!

What is Considered Too Slow?

If your Miami website loads with only slight delays, you are likely safe from feeling a huge negative impact on your rankings. Surprisingly only one out of a hundred searches has load times that could impact the site’s overall SEO.

With this in mind, your site’s content still takes precedence when climbing the rankings. Despite this fact, Google still recommends all websites ranking in the bottom 5% for load times to increase their speed and reduce latency.

Is your website still stuttering along with subpar load times? Don’t let these performance issues affect your rankings. Moreover, consider all of the potential customers and revenue that you could be losing as a result. If your site seems slow, there are countless ways to easily improve it; regain that lost business in Miami, and stop aggravating your prospective customers now!