Today’s topic is “Does website speed affect your search engine optimization?” There are many things that can affect your website’s search engine optimization (SEO). Using the right keywords, for example, is a big part of getting more attention to your site, as is using links correctly. However, the impact of website loading time on your SEO is a little less clear. It is a common belief that how long your website takes to load affects its search engine ranking. This means a lean site that loads in seconds should theoretically outperform a carbon copy that isn’t as fast.
In this article, we’re going to talk about the ways we know that website speed can affect user experience. Then we’ll discuss the real impact of load times on your SEO and teach you how to improve your results. Let’s get to work!
How website speed affects user’s experience
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- Slow pages are annoying. If you’re frustrated with a site, you might not end up checking out any of its content, much less making a purchase.
- They lead to high bounce rates. When someone visits a website and leaves before interacting with any part of it, we call them a ‘bounced’ visitor. The more you have, the higher your bounce rate, which is often the result of a poor user experience.
As a general rule, your website should take no longer than two seconds to fully load. After that point, bounce rates increase dramatically. The shorter your loading time, the better your users’ overall experience should be.
Before we move on if you’re not sure how to measure your website’s loading times, check out the Pingdom tool or other services we’ve reviewed in the past. On these sites, you can enter any URL you want and check within seconds to see how long it takes to load.
Plus, many will give you tips on how to improve the performance of each page you test.
Does Loading Time Affect Your SEO?
The short answer is yes. Google, in particular, is clear about the fact that they consider loading time when determining a website’s ranking. It’s unclear how much this metric affects your results.
A few years ago, Moz – one of the top SEO consulting firms around – conducted the most thorough study of how website speed affects search engine results. They assembled a list of over 100,000 of the best results for random search queries and tested them to see how optimized they were. Surprisingly, their results did not find a direct correlation between the time it takes to fully load a website – which we call fully rendered time – and their rankings. Instead, they realized that Google was focusing on Time to First Byte (TTFB) measurements and using them to influence its results.
Technically speaking, this means there is a link between load time and SEO, but not in the way you might think. Simply put, TTFB is how long it takes your website’s server to respond to a connection attempt. It could be that your website’s TTFB averages 0.3 seconds, for example, but it takes a total of 1.2 seconds to fully render.
With that in mind, there are two main variables that can affect your site’s TTFB:
- Internet speed of your visitors. This affects how long it takes them to connect to your server.
- Your server performance. By performance, we mean how long it takes your server to process the initial request and respond to it (in other words, to send the first byte back).
Since you cannot control the internet speed of your visitors, it stands to reason that the best way to improve your TTFB is to get better overall performance from your servers. Let’s talk about how to do it.
1. How to optimize your website’s TTFB for better search engine results
There are many ways to get faster full-rendered loading times However when it comes to TTFB. You’re a little more limited in what you can do. In most cases, the metric is largely influenced by your server’s performance, which leaves you with two options.
As you may know, not all hosting services are created equal. Some providers take performance more seriously, which translates into better and more optimized servers. As a user, you should try to pick the best host you can find and choose a plan that suits your website needs.
2. Integrate a Content Delivery Network (CDN) into your website
CDNs are data centers spread across the globe, where you can store cached copies of your website. When someone tries to access it, they will be sent to the nearest data center, resulting in less stress on your servers and better overall load times for your visitors.
As you can imagine, this type of service usually comes at a premium. However, Cloudflare offers a decent starter plan for free:
Cloudflare’s free plan supports up to three pages, which should be enough for smaller websites to cache their most important content. Plus, it’s pretty easy to set up. If you need more than that, check out our roundup of the best CDNs around to help you choose options.
Conclusion
In theory, your website could take four seconds to load but still if its content is outstanding and its TTFB is fast enough. However, in practice, you will want to make sure that your website is well-optimized in all aspects. After all, you don’t want users to find your site only to freak out when they realize how lazy it is. And website speed can affect search engine optimization but how much effect it’s not declared.
