Fix your Slow Website to Improve your Search Engine Ranking

Posted by Mary Gammel on May 2, 2010 under Organic SEO | Be the First to Comment

Google is now including page speed in it’s search engine ranking calculations. This was officially announced on April 9th, 2010 in their blog article: Using site speed in web search ranking. Slow web sites turn away visitors and chew up internet bandwidth.  So, Google is now including this new Organic SEO Metric in an effort to get people to clean up and streamline their web sites. Google states that currently fewer than 1% of search queries are affected by the site speed signal and if you haven’t seen much change to your site rankings, then this site speed change possibly did not impact your site.

Benefits of Speeding up Your Web Site

• Visitors will be happier because they don’t have to wait as long for your web site to respond
• Faster rendering on cell phones and other handheld devices
• Potential improvement in your search engine rankings
• Potential savings on your web site hosting costs due to smaller data transfers

What factors can slow down a web site?

• Images and Photos that are not optimized for the web
• Multimedia files like flash and video that are not optimized for the Internet
• Third party plug-ins to share information on your site with social networking and bookmarking sites
• Displaying of content that is not local to your web server such as images hosted on another web site, affiliate marketing is a big culprit here
• Web site code such as HTML, CSS, Javascript, or PHP that can be streamlined or cleaned up
• Loading too many linked files in the header of a web page or loading them in the wrong order
• Web server configurations that do not take advantage of caching or sufficient memory usage

How can you tell if a web page is slow or has poor performance?

Most of the factors that affect web site speed are technical in nature. But you can use a few tools that grade your web site’s performance to see areas of your web site that can improve speed-wise. I suggest using the Page Speed Firefox add-in  which runs under Firebug. You have to download the Firebug add-in, too. After installing it, just open Firefox, start Firebug and then Page Speed. Then Navigate to your home page and analyze the performance.

Page Speed will give your web page a score out of 100 points. As in school, you want to get an ‘A’ so you want a value over 90. The higher the better. You may also see red, yellow, and green highlighted items in the results. You’ll want to address the red and yellow items for the most speed improvement. For a technical explanation of Page Speed results,  you can see Google’s Web Performance Best Practices guide.

If you’re not technically inclined, you’ll need to work with a web site designer or consultant to fix the items found in Page Speed. To make changes, you’ll also require access to the underlying files and code of your web site along with the web server that hosts your site.

So, you may be out of luck if you use a third-party service or a template solution for your site. If this is the case, you may be able to make a few small changes such as optimizing any images that you’ve uploaded to your web site.

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Mary Gammel is the owner and principal consultant of Quality Web Site Testing, LLC. Her education includes bachelors and masters degrees in computer science. She’s worked over 25 years in the computing industry with experience in internet consulting, software development, software quality assurance, computer networking, and project management. Mary can be contacted at 630-767-9859 or info@qualitywebsitetesting.com.