SEO Speed 3 Tools
If you’ve been following this blog for a little while you know I babble on about the importance of site speed. Nearly four years ago Google made page load times a part of their algorithm. They had been hinting for about a year that they would make the change. The logic for adding speed as a signal was simple, it’s a better user experience. You won’t click on a link in SERPs for a competitive result and have to wait eons for the page to load. Google has pretty much eliminated slow sites from ranking.
What is slow for SEO?
I believe it is relative to the other web pages you are competing against. For instance if the most relevant results for a search all have page load times around 1500ms you need to be as quick or quicker. I often get asked how important is it for ranking? I usually ask back, “How important is it for your users to have a good experience?”
Three Speed Tools For SEO
1. Start with webmaster tools and have a look at the crawl speed.
If your page load times are over 2 seconds that is too slow. You need to speed things up.
2. Here is Google’s main speed testing tool. It will tell you some of the main things you can do to soup up your page load times. I tried it out again on this site this morning and even though my page load times are generally under a second, I still found a couple of things I could do to improve things. It will give you a score for both desktop and mobile visitors.
3. I really like webpagetest.org as it gives you a visual display of loading times for every element on the page as well as list of things you can fix straight away.
If all of these things do little to improve page load times, chances are there is something chewing up resources on your server. You may be on an under powered server being hosted with 100s of other sites or the coding of your site is resource intensive. You may need to speak with your hosting company to get on a better server and/or get them to check what is slowing things down. Most hosting companies are pretty good at providing this feedback.
Have a safe one
Finally I’d just like to say thanks to you, our customers, partners and staff, for making this a truly great year for our business. I really do get a buzz from helping people with their businesses and I may not get to answer all your questions but I do try! Have a safe and joyous holiday season and in this week’s video you will get to meet some of our team.
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
