By: Arthur Cooper
Submitted: 2010-12-13 16:40:07 | Word Count: 664
Yes, it absolutely does. Although the goods and services offered on your website may be in high demand, if your site loads slowly, you may find that you are not getting as much traffic as you expected. The truth is that in the age of instant gratification, users simply don’t have much patience for pages that take long to load or sites that are slow to get through. They simply aren’t used to waiting anymore.
In fact, no matter how great your website’s content is, if a user clicks on your landing page and doesn’t instantly see the information they expected, they just hit the back button and try someone else’s site. Since Google came out with their Instant Preview function, it has been even harder getting a user to come to your landing page, much less wait for it to load when they get there. These simple human habits are being noted by the web spiders (or web bots) that search engines like Google employ to crawl through the internet looking for sites with relevant data. Not only are they copying, indexing and storing sites based on content, they are ranking them on speed and usability now as well. The longer it takes your website to load, the less likely your site is to appear on pages 1-3 of the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). Most users never go past page 3 when searching on Google , so that is bad news indeed.
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So the problem is that the way users relate to your site (not just the quality of information they find on it) is now ranked along with everything else. Thus, site speed is just as important now and can negatively or positively affect your Google ranking. Proper SEO techniques now demands that online businesses do everything they can to increase their site’s speed so that they will be able to increase the sales or leads crucial for their business’s success.
If your landing page (the point of entry from a search engine) has to make too many HTTP requests just to load, you will have a problem getting traffic to your site. Remember, an HTTP request has to be made for every feature on your page, whether it has Flash, background images, scripts, style sheets, or whatever. You have to therefore concentrate on reducing the amount of HTTP requests your site has to make to become viewable to the user. This can include reducing your page sizes, using inline images that are embedded in your cached style sheets, combining multiple images into one image map (so it makes only one HTTP request), and in general, combining as many files as you can.
You can also take advantage of a Content Delivery Network that will spread your static content all over the web, making it close to as many servers as possible to reduce the response time it takes to show up on various geographically distant servers. Moving style sheets to the front end also makes the site appear to be loading faster to the user (even if it isn’t), and conversely, moving scripts to the bottom saves time because they block parallel downloads. By placing them last, the user will have something on the front end to chew on while the bottom of the page is loading.
Does site speed affect Google ranking and SEO performance, absolutely, but there are many ways to speed up your site. Optimum7 can help to increase your loading speed by implementing these and other techniques. Contact us today! You can call us at 1-800-736-9618.
