Did Your Google Traffic Drop in April?

[Chris Munch]

If your Google traffic dropped around April there's a good chance it was due to Google starting to take into consideration your website's loading time into its algorithm.

If your site is slow then Google will not rank you as highly.

I've personally seen that this is a relatively strong factor in rankings, especially if your site is quite slow to begin with.

If you are using a platform like Wordpress and you have not optimized your site to load quickly there's a good chance you have loading time issues.

[paulgl]

My overall traffic dropped a tad, some sites were up.
But quality traffic seems to be much better.

My visitors are much more generous lately...

Slowness is really a non-issue. There are 99 other things that
are much more important.

If your traffic dropped drastically, then
your site dropped for reasons other than speed.

Paul

[Chris Munch]

Originally Posted by paulgl

If your traffic dropped drastically, then
your site dropped for reasons other than speed.

My own evidence points to the contrary, but I agree there are always lots of variables at play.

I had one site set up incorrectly and it dropped by about 40% following the introduction of site speed, upon being fixed it has recovered most of it and is rising steadily.

Similar stories from a few friends too. I've been doing a lot on site speed and have been finding it a pretty crucial aspect to how a site is set up.

In some cases it will have a bigger impact than others, and it certainly is not a magic bullet for ranking highly, but it seems to help a lot, especially considering it seems to have a very strong effect on how users interact with your site.