Does Page Load speed affect search engine ranking?

Is your site slow to load? Have you checked it lately? How would you even know?

In 2009 Google flagged to website owners that the speed at which pages on your website load (or “site speed”) is an important metric you should be assessing from a usability perspective.

And it’s not just a matter of upgrading your website hosting to a faster, dedicated hosting plan, it’s also about creating elegant code, which loads quickly and is nimble for browsers.

Developers take note.

Research shows that website conversion rates are improved when a website is lightening fast, as people spend less time waiting and more time browsing in their task -based mindset.

Google does seem to spending a lot of money educating us about ways we can improve the speed of our websites with this dedicated “let’s make the web faster” section.

And recently Matt Cutts (head of Google’s Web Spam team) weighed in on the act, saying in a late 2009 interview that although Google doesn’t currently factor in page speed to its ranking algorithm, it’s something “...that could change in 2010”.

I think we can read that as, “...it probably will change in 2010”; so here comes yet another change to watch out for in amongst the 400 or so algorithm changes every year.

I think you might be able to get the ‘seo jump’ on competitors in 2010 if you spend a little time optimising page load time on your site. That’s got to help your online sales.

To check the speed of your site, get the FireFox Plug-in, FireBug then add YSlow, or “PageSpeed” to find out!

Without going into too much detail, these tools will help you or your developer understand which aspects of your pages and associated code cause page-loading times to slow down.

You can upload the results from the Page Speed (and YSlow) to http://www.showslow.com to see how your site ranks amongst some of the biggest and the best.



Speaking of concern, looking at the screenshot above, there’s quite a discrepancy between the two tools! YSlow says the MSN website (second from the bottom) gets a page load score of 68% where as the PageSpeed Tool returns 81% for the same site.

So which score will Google use?

Given YSlow is a Yahoo product, my money’s on PageSpeed.

Google’s not saying anything, but I’m guessing any ‘score’ slower than 80% could be cause for concern. You should at least forward this answer to your developer if you’re worried.

Another aspect to consider is the physical location of your webhosting. Ideally you should host in the primary country where your audience lives as this will “generally speaking” make your website load quicker for them.

Obviously it’s tempting to take your web hosting offshore as it can be a lot cheaper, but it is getting much competitive here in Australia and you can pick up some pretty good hosting deals these days.

Speed thrills.

How to Test Print Ad Effectiveness Online

The best way to find out how your print ad's are performing for an online store is to create a special URL which is unique to your Newspaper Ad, which people will type in directly in response to seeing it!

So for example, you could create a url which provides some kind of incentive to type it in, like this: http://www.yourdomainname.com.au/freeshipping

This will then redirect to your free shipping offer page.

http://www.yourdomainname.com.au/product-cateogry/product1-free-shipping.html

You might need to get your developer to help set up the redirect if your CMS doesn’t support it.

To really see what’s going on in Analytics, you’ll need to add some campaign tracking script to the end of your link above (your destination URL).

To do this, visit Google’s Campaign URL Builder. Don’t get scared off, this is really easy!

Here’s an example:



What you’ll get is a link that looks like this (where the campaign tracking information is added automatically to the end of the link):

http://www.yourdomainname.com.au/product-cateogry/product1-free-shipping.html?utm_source=Sydney-Morning-herald&utm_medium=Print&utm_campaign=Free-Shipping

If you don’t add this additional code to your url, you won’t be able to tell whether someone came through via your print Ad (or any other channel for that matter, Twitter, facebook etc – and ideally links from those channels should also be tracked).

Then, to see a report in analytics you’ll need to go to Traffic Sources > Campaigns.



Then voila!

Over time, this report will tell you how many people came from your Print Ad.

Here’s how it looks:



Select "Source" to sort your campaign by the sources you have defined.

In the above example screenshot, you can see that Print was responsible for 153 visits during the period.

This will really help you understand whether your print campaign is performing against other campaign channels.

You can get much more granular information if you create goals, or have e-commerce enabled analytics tracking, as you can then see revenue generated based on each campaign channel.

Now that’s powerful!

This is going to help your online sales because you’ll begin to understand where your advertising budget is best spent!

So simple.

More information is available here.