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How often does Google test your site's speed?

by searchin
13 replies
  • SEO
    • |
It's known that Google uses website speed as a ranking factor.

My questions are
- How do they determine your website's speed?

- Is it only determined during index/crawl time (and you therefore must wait until your website is re-indexed in order to get the ranking boost?)

- If you upgraded your servers/network throughput (but pages remain the same) how soon would you have to wait until you see the ranking boost?
#google #site #speed
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  • Profile picture of the author MikeFriedman
    Originally Posted by searchin View Post

    It's known that Google uses website speed as a ranking factor.

    My questions are
    - How do they determine your website's speed?

    - Is it only determined during index/crawl time (and you therefore must wait until your website is re-indexed in order to get the ranking boost?)

    - If you upgraded your servers/network throughput (but pages remain the same) how soon would you have to wait until you see the ranking boost?

    It's really not a ranking factor unless your site loads ridiculously slow. If your site is loading in 2 seconds and you speed it up to 1.5 seconds, I would not expect to see any change in ranking as a result.

    It is doubtful they ever really look at site speed specifically. There are too many variables.

    If I am in the U.S. connecting to a site in India, the speed will likely be different than someone in India connecting to the same site.

    If 3 million people are visiting a website right now, chances are the speed will be different than at a time when only 200,000 are visiting the same site.

    Now if your site takes 10 seconds to load or goes so slow it frequently times out, that is a problem. Otherwise, I would not worry about site speed too much.

    Some of the most popular sites on the internet have awful site speed like Cnet, ESPN, CNN, Mashable, etc.
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  • Profile picture of the author fastreplies
    Originally Posted by searchin View Post

    How do they determine your website's speed?
    There is no way anything can determine such a thing simply because
    thing never stay the same thus whatever been true one second ago
    totally different next second and so on.

    For G. wasting time trying to do that is like using color of your site's pages
    or type colors or size to determine SERP simply absurd which can be used
    by "SEO Pros" to brainwash their clients for lack of better BS.



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  • Profile picture of the author searchin
    Thank you,
    you both are absolutely right, your site speed varies depending on the time of day (and other factors) - Which is why I was worried in the first place; Google crawls my site during on-peak hours and slows it down for everyone, including themselves.

    I'm just glad they're crawling my pages like their life depends on it so I won't dream of limiting their crawl rate.

    Thanks again for the clarification Mike, fastreplies.
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    • Profile picture of the author paulgl
      Originally Posted by searchin View Post

      Thank you,
      Google crawls my site during on-peak hours and slows it down for everyone, including themselves.
      Man are you out of this world bonkers.

      If that's true...which is an almost impossible if...but if that is true....

      Your site is too far gone. Take it offline. It's a piece of garbage.

      Paul
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  • Profile picture of the author searchin
    Okay so I just did more research on it.
    It's more of a differentiator than a ranking factor, if you have 2 sites with similar content that ranks more or less the same then the one with the faster speed takes precedence.

    Source - Mike Cutts
    Old video though
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  • Profile picture of the author LucidWebMarketing
    They surely look at site loading speed but that is but a small percentage of the overall score. As Mike said, unless your site loads ridiculously slow, every site is pretty much on an even footing. A site that loads in 1.5 vs one at 2.0 seconds is not at an advantage for reasons Mike pointed out.


    You ask technical questions that are really out of the scope of what you can do about it. But, as for how they determine the speed, start timing from the time the request to load a page is initiated until it is loaded. That's easy enough, I can do that on my computer. Obviously that's done when they crawl your site, specifically when they crawl a specific page.


    Your post's title about how often that happens - which is really how often does Google crawl a site - I'm sure you can find out from your logs when they do. I believe this varies and you can tell Google to crawl more or less often. A news site will be crawled more often, likely a few times a day. Others may be once a week.
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  • Profile picture of the author searchin
    Thank you for answering my question - "how often do they test your website's speed", because what I was getting at was - would improving the sitespeed affect pages that were already indexed (until they are indexed again), or would it just affect pages that were indexed from when it was improved.

    My technical questions and obsession about sitespeed is due to the fact that I'm observing (from my analytics) the direct effect that it has on the bounce rate (and implicitly, conversions).
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    • Profile picture of the author MikeFriedman
      Originally Posted by searchin View Post

      My technical questions and obsession about sitespeed is due to the fact that I'm observing (from my analytics) the direct effect that it has on the bounce rate (and implicitly, conversions).
      Bounce rate and conversions have nothing to do with your rankings.

      It really doesn't matter if or when Google checks your pagespeed. Again, it is only going to be a factor if your site is loading incredibly slow. Like so slow that their crawler gives up on it and leaves.
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      • Profile picture of the author searchin
        Thanks, I know the bounces and conversions don't impact SEO - because that's data Google does not have.
        I meant to say that sitespeed was more of a concern due to its impact on bounces & conversions.

        I could've sworn I read that the sitespeed impacts the mobile-first index, though not significantly.
        But you're right, the sitespeed is not a major factor in SEO rankings unless it's significantly slow.
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  • Profile picture of the author JohnVianny
    You're facing the WORST aspect of SEO.

    Which is: it's underterminable in last instance: you CANNOT simply know if they're going to check your website speed, penalize it or whatsoever..

    BUT

    If you're wondering about it, maybe you have the suspicious it's low. So better use some test online and see if it's in the average and the uptime of your hosting server.
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    • Profile picture of the author searchin
      Yes I am a bit worried, it's 1.59 seconds sometimes, at other times it's about 3 seconds.
      SSL/TLS added 500ms overhead.
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      • Profile picture of the author teepleb
        I can assure you there is more to worry about than a 3 second load time. I am currently conducting SEO on sites that get anywhere from 7-15 seconds/page and these are national brand websites (health & automotive industry) that secure position 1 spots across the board. As long as it loads fast enough to serve the user data - you'll be fine.

        As others stated Page Speed is not the final factor (or even a major one) that separates you from the others.
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