Site Load Speed vs Google Rankings
We all know the frustrations of waiting for a web page to load especially on mobile and certainly when we are expecting instant results. Waiting 6 seconds or more for the page to fully load is just going to annoy you and chances are you will probably click back to the search results, choose an alternative website selling the same products and select that.
Well, Google feels exactly the same way as you do and therefore ranks your website according to how fast or slow your site loads, as Google is always trying to give its users the best experience they can, a slow loading website certainly isn’t a good experience.
How do you check the speed of your website?
Luckily there are some free tools you can use that can help you work out your website page speed on a Desktop and a Mobile device
Google’s own tool, just type in your URL and it will give you a score out of 100, obviously the closer you are to 100 for both desktop and mobile the quicker your site loads and this will in turn improve your website rankings: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
After you have run this test this tool gives you list of high, medium and low priority areas for improvement.
This screen shot shows the score from a website. The mobile score out of 100 is only 14, so some work to do. It also gives you the ‘First Contentful Paint’ time of 3.5s this means the first content to show up on the screen is 3.5s, but this doesn’t even mean the page has loaded just the first elements have, the load time is a whopping 26.3 seconds.
Google does give you the areas that are causing problems and depending on your ability, you can either tackle these yourself or find a website developer to help.
So you can see it can be quite a useful tool to check on the web loading speed of your website especially as it gives you the ability to look at Desktop and Mobile loading speeds separately.
Test My Site
Another useful tool Google has is one called ‘Test My Site’ https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/feature/testmysite/
This does much the same job but concentrates on Mobile devices only.
I like this site because:
- It shows your site speed on a 4G connection
- Generates a free report so you can see the issues to help optimise your site
- Benchmark industry leaders by entering the URL of your competitors and seeing how you compare
- Evaluation tool to see how a faster site could have a positive impact on your business.
Just enter your websites URL and you will be taken to a page with all the information to help you improve your website speed.
This is an area that Google uses as a ranking factor, so it is important that you run these test and make sure you speed up your website loading speeds.