Does putting a nice background behind your site will improve ranking too?

Nope? Or maybe yes.

The thing here it's not all about how nice your site looks but how easy it is for your viewers/readers to use your site.

This can be measured by how long your your readers stays on your site or how many pages they view before they leave.

That's why making sure if it's mobile responsive , fast loading and has good quality content is a must. Think about it..

A good quality content will get your readers hooked on a single page for minutes because they are reading the content.

They will also be more open to checking other pages of your website.

If it is not mobile responsive and the readers are viewing your website on a mobile phone, do you think your readers will stay long enough?

If the page loads very slow, people will leave your page, that's why website speed is also an important factor for your SEO.

These kinds of metrics is just a few basis of google to know if your site is good. If they see that people love your site, then they will reward you with higher rankings (of course this is just one the basis)

So instead of answering your question, I will return the question to you.

Do you think putting a large image on the background of your site will improve the user experience? Or do you think it will just slow down the loading of the webpage?

This should probably be in the SEO section, but a background won't effect your rankings. Rankings all come down to onpage/offpage optimization and good quality content. Not to mention the little signals like being mobile friendly, using HTTPS, website load times..etc. Nothing relating to the background you're using (unless it's a really huge image file that effects page loading speeds lol)

I don't know, to be honest, but I wouldn't be surprised to find out it does. After all, Google wants to return visitors the best websites when searching, so if the background contributes to this, and if their algorithm can determine this, I don't see why it shouldn't be taken into consideration.

The main way I see this being used is if the background color/image makes it hard for people to read the text. There are websites with dark background and black text which are difficult to read. In the eyes of Google, that's a bad experience for the user, and Google doesn't want that.

I doubt just adding a background image affects your ranking.

If it improves your visitor retention, then yes. But as a standalone factor, very doubtful.

I'm no that much into SEO and how people rank their sites as I'm more into paid ads, but here's how a nice background would improve your rankings (in my opinion).

Ugly sites have bigger bounce rates, meaning that people who visit a site that looks like it was built in 1997, they leave very quickly.

On the other hand, responsive sites, with nice graphics make people stay longer, in my opinion. Obviously the content on your site has to be great, but people that visit a more 'professionally' looking website, tend to trust it more.

This is obviously my opinion, as for your original question about background image; I don't think it's going to help you in ranking higher on Google. Why would that happen?

Unless you're talking about a responsive site, with great design, awesome content.. Then that's a whole different story.

Perhaps I might be wrong,

Cheers!

God only know who makes this stuff up, they must be short of something to write about.

Chin...

Design = Think site architecture and navigation.

Content = Think relevancy to search query + helpfulness to visitor

Ranking = Think good backlinks

A pretty background image will do dick for ranking a site - period.

I'd also say that the effect is most likely a negative one. As others pointed out, large images affect loading time, and that's something that Google is known to track.

It's not clear what they do about bounce rates and such. Still, using a background image tends to be sort of an advanced feature in web design. If you see one that looks good it's either placed there by a professional designer, or the image working well is just pure luck. Most background images (apart from simple gradients) look terrible.

I have heard a lot of dumb and stupid theories about SEO over the years, but this might be the dumbest one yet.