Page Load Time

Well, take a look at the site and see what images you could do without. A lot of image heavy sites might look sharp, but they'd pay for it in terms of conversion and traffic. Most these days just want to get the information they came for.

Of course, a good way to do this also is to take a look at the size of the images as well. Image optimization in something like Photoshop (or if you're budget conscious, Photoshop Elements, or Paint.net) won't take too long to do, and in the case of Elements is extremely easy.

Do that first. Take the ads off, and see how things load. Then, take a look at the ads themselves. Are they a lot of image or multimedia type ads?

Regarding the videos, are they just linked to or are you actually hosting the files on your server (and not on Amazon S3 or what have you)? Regarding plugins, this is something you want to take a look at too. How many are you running? It could be that one or several are slowing your site down. Disable all of them and load the site. Then, enable them one by one and see what happens to your load time. Also, take a look at see what plugins are actually a necessity and what can be dropped. A cache optimization plugin is a good idea here (like Super Cache, W3T Cache or Cloudflare).

As to why it's not discussed? It's not a "sexy" thing to talk about, like conversions, squeeze pages etc. would be my guess. And it CAN get technical as well.

It is probably do to it being such a small factor compared to others in the SEO ranking topics. Do not get me wrong on site factors are important but not as concerning as for as organic rankings. Loading time becomes much more of a factor when dealing with PPC, but there are less here that are practicing PPC compared to organic listings.


Content and user experience will probably always play a part in the algorithms of SE but we must focus on the overall strategy and not be hung up on the small things.


Let me know if this helps thanks Panic

Panic, this is only my 2nd post in the forums, but I'll offer my two cents. Of course there's a debate over just how much page load time factors into G's algo's and their rankings. It's a factor, and some will say a decent one; others will say it's a minor one.

I can only speak for myself. In today's A.D.D. culture, I don't want to wait 4-6-8 seconds for a page to load. If a page takes more than a couple of seconds, I'm outta there. I'm sure it's even more like that for younger generations. Now, "Matty C" says he wants to make G just like a human being.

If you'd like suggestions on how to increase your site's particular load time, just run a GTMetrix Test on it, and that will give you the GT and Yslow scores. To get more suggestions, run a Pingdom on your site. I don't like any of my domains below 90%, or more than 2 seconds load time. However that factors into SEO ratings, people can debate that.

What are some things?

1. Image compression. Like NicNac suggested, I use Pixlr as well -- a lightweight, free little online tool. Save as .jpg, and 80% (default) is fine; results in quality images. Of course, .png's will take up more space. After saving your new image, always run it through a tool like Yahoo Smush It, or some other compression tool.

2. Minify all your HTML, javascripts and CSS. Get rid of all the comments, whitespace, and other things. Not everything works in all minifiers, so just make a backup of 'em before you minify 'em.

3. Combine your javascripts and CSS -- if you can and it doesn't mess anything up..

4. Sprite your images. If you have a page with a list of customers and their logos, or whatever, instead of having 15 pictures, use CSS and sprite your images so that turns 15 http requests into 1 http request.

4.5 Do everything you can to minimize the amount of http requests. If you're an asp.net guy, then don't load all your javascripts in every master page if not all pages need 'em. If you're a WP-Joomla-Blogger (or whatever) guy, find a plugin that allows you to choose which plugins load on which pages and posts.

5. Use a CDN like Amazon as someone mentioned. As an alternative, use CloudFlare (I do). They have paid versions or free versions, and all are good. While it's not a traditional CDN, per se, it basically acts like one. You'll have to change your nameservers but you'll notice a boost in speed immediately.

6. Remove the query strings from static resources ... like resources with a "?" in them, aren't cached by some proxy servers.

7. Leverage your browsing caching. Use a caching server, or if you're a WP person, a caching plugin so people are served static html pages instead of dynamic pages.

8. Specify your image dimensions ... always have height and width attriubute.

9. Put your CSS at the top, and if you can put some javascripts above your closing </body> tag, do so.

Other things you can look into would be making sure keep-alive is enabled on your server. Some say expiry headers are necessary, while this article says they're harmful. Avoid empty href or src.

Those are some of the more important components that go into page load time. Again, to what extent this affects SEO is debatable, but I know as a visitor, if there are all kinds of pop-ups, slow pages, and things aren't clean and quick, I'm outta there. Hope this helped!

@jpweber wow 2 posts in and you just gave more value than many people on this forum will ever give. Thanks!

these are great tips, I will need a while to digest them. Some of them are a bit technical for me, but I will investigate.

You really need to watch out what host you use. A lot of them overload servers, and throttle your connections. EIG brands, Godaddy, 1&1, etc, are very guilty of this. And if you don't know who EIG is, you may be in for a surprise. A lot of them -- Bluehost, iPage, HostGator, Powweb, etc -- are all owned by EIG!

google webmaster tools has a tool for analyzing page load and provides tips on how you can improve it, you can also use cache plugins like W3 cache if using wordpress