site speed: does it matters page rank ?

On April, 2010 google officially announced site speed is one of the factors which impacts search rankings in their official webmaster’s blog . They added page speed is a new signal for search engines ranking algorithms. Simply site speed reflects how quickly a website responds to web requests. Google will consider page load time, as one of the biggest reason for your website search engine ranking.

what will 1-second delay of site speed cost to the e-commerce site, this below image explains the answer.

 The site speed is matters, suppose when people are looking for “cars”. There are similar results from your competitor’s website also, then your website will be top in search results when your Site loading time is less and better user experience. This is the point that google focus on official blog. Even if your blog has faster loading time, maybe there is a chance for more bounce rate, if the content is not relevant as well as having less user experience. Both user experience and site speed should be optimum.

Major reasons for slow load time?

• Your host a cheap web hosting generally not give optimum speeds. Choose the good host that fits to your business.
• Unoptimized browser, plugins will also cause for more load time.
• External embedded media like images and videos used in the website. If they not optimized cause slow speed.
• Too much ads also one of the major region for the slow page loading.
• Larger images can really lower your page speed.
• Widgets placing social media widgets also effect page speed.
• Using theme some time cause low page speeds, if it is highly designed.

These are some major regions that effect site speed. apart from this so many things effects page speeds.

see more:

• How to write SEO friendly page titles?
• How to SEO friendly URL structure?
• How to add SEO optimized media to website?

Does page speed more important than relevance?

While site speed is a new signal, currently, fewer than 1% of search queries are affected by the site speed signal in their algorithm implementation.  Even the signal for site speed only applies for visitors searching in English on Google.com

How the Google determines site speed?

Google in made several experiments before consider the page speed as a factor for page rank. In their google research blog said that

“Our experiments demonstrate that slowing down the search results page by 100 to 400 milliseconds has a measurable impact on the number of searches per user of -0.2% to -0.6% (averaged over four or six weeks depending on the experiment). That’s 0.2% to 0.6% fewer searches for changes under half a second!”

Is page speed important factor for mobile devices?

How to check site speed?

There are different free site speed tools available to check speed of the websites. I am giving some of the best tools to find speed of website.

Google Page speed insights:

Page speed insights  is an online tool which helps in identifying performance best practices on any given website. It also suggests webpage’s optimizations, and suggests overall ideas of How to make a website faster?. Simple tool which grades performance on a scale from 1 to 100 and provides a report on suggested optimizations.

Pingdom website speed test:

This pingdom  tracks the up-time, downtime, and performance of websites. Simply pingdom monitors websites from multiple locations globally so that it can calculate genuine downtime. Pingdom will display load time of your webpage and also provide you with performance grade based on several important factors.

         They offer different premium plans to monitor continuously your website’s up-time, speed and performance they offer monthly plans ranging from $ 13.95/Mon to $ 454.00/Mon.

GTmetrix:

GTmetrix gives the full picture on how site loads and helps you to know why your website is slow.it gives page speed and YSlow scores and recommendations to improve site’s speed. It also provides page load details like time, size, number of requests, various analysis options and waterfall reports. If you sign up for free account, you will able to track history of your reports. Paid plans also available for hourly monitoring, PDF reports and more.

Webpagetest:

Webpagetest is a FREE online tool that helps to calculate load time. You can also perform test by selecting different test locations as well as choose different browsers to test.

YSlow:

Yslow is a free plugin for your browser that can helps to find performance of any webpage you visit. It also provides different performance grades, as well as advice on how to improve both speed and performance.

How to improve site speed?

Reduce image size:

It is one of the major cause to low speed times of blog. You can use many web tools to compress your images without reducing the quality of the image. Use EWWW image optimizer, which is one of the best plugins for WordPress to compress images.

       Simple tip I use sometimes if image size is too large, I will upload into my Facebook account keep the post as only me. after I download images, I get surprised the image size is reduced with optimum image quality. But it takes some time to upload and download.

Caching system:

This is the best mechanism to improve site loading speed. use any one cache plugin to reduce server load. The request will be served directly from earlier saved page on your web host. This plugin will reduce server load and pages will be served instantly. Use WP super cache or w3 total cache to improve page loading time. Don’t use both plugins at a time. Also, leverage browser caching to improve page speed.

Avoid more ads on your website:

Placing more ads on your website will increase page load time. If you want to monetize your blog Google AdSense is best method, it is well optimized and loads fast when compared to other. There are some alternative methods to monetize your blog. Don’t use too many ads negatively impact on website speed.

Enable compression:

We can enable Gzip compression  via .htaccess, this compression is enabled by adding code to .htaccess file on their web server. The .htaccess file controls many important things for your site. This compression also done for different web servers like Apache and NGINX.  Gzip will compress the size of the page sent to the browser which then uncompressed the information and displays it for the user.

Webhosting:

Web hosting also plays major role in site loading. If the hosting service which you use is older servers, the up time may not good. For better loading speeds the server response must be at lightening speeds for request. Go best hosting provider which sure, good up time as well as best performance. I recommend bluehost to host your WordPress website. because it provides best uptimes and great costumer service when compared to other hosting providers.

Use CSS sprites:

If your website has more number of images, then convert them in to on big image in order to reduce more server requests. This will improve website load times. Learn about CSS sprites how to use will definitely help to optimize your blog.

Using Content Distribution Network:

in order to decrease the load on the servers it is better to use content distribution network to load page faster. Simply we can understand, copies of your content are stored in different data centers geographically helps to load website faster and improves more reliable access to your website. Mostly CDN allows users to download data parallel, helping your site load faster.

Minify CSS, HTML and java Scripts:

By optimizing code, like CSS, html and java scripts including special characters you can improve page speed. try to remove comments and unused codes will improve page loading speed. try to optimize CSS. Rather than using customization of HTML and java script individually, use CSS whenever require.

Try to minimize HTTP request will help page load faster. If possible reduce the number of items that need to be loaded, such as style sheets, images and scripts.

Reduce Redirects:

Adding page redirection will take more time to load because it requires more http requests from the server. Try to avoid 301 redirection force the browser to a new URL and require the browser to wait for the HTTP request to come back to new page.

Remove unnecessary widgets:

First take care about better user experience the widgets like Facebook, twitter and Alexa rank widgets make sites slow. But placing this widget will increase social media traffic and improves your identity in social media. Try to get rid of unnecessary widgets, if possible. This widgets optimization if up to you.

Should I remove widgets that increase my site’s time?

Try to avoid using more number of plugins:

Using more number of plugins not recommended, because it increase average loading time of your blog. These plugins are running in the back ground and using more resources from the server. Try to use less plugins as minimum as possible. Here are some best word press plugins to improve your blog performance.

Other tips to improve site speed:

 Apart from this tips, moving script code to the bottom will helps to load content and media in website faster when compared to background scripts. Using browser caching will automatically load previous static prefetch images, scripts and PDFs easily. Flash content significantly increases the load time of your blog. Try to avoid using flash and related material.

W3 total cache plugin provides this browser caching feature. Use most recent(latest) and powerful word press themes having less scripts and more user friendly one. Although page speed is one among 200 factors that google consider for the page ranking. Even it does not affect too much, if the content in your blog is good and it is relevant.

If you build large number of followers, if build trust with your quality of the content. Then page load is does not matter for a professional blogger having awesome and branded content.