Website Page Speed and Search Ranking

Website speed is a major Google Search ranking factor, which means that fast websites tend to rank better than slow websites. How can you measure your website speed and make it faster?

In 2018 Google made an announcement that "Speed is now used as a ranking factor for mobile searches", although website page speed has been a ranking factor for websites on Google Search for desktops and laptops since 2010.

When you visit a slow website, sometimes it's noticeably slow, especially on a phone. You could end up waiting a bit for the page to load. But other slow websites may come up quickly enough even though Google considers them slow, because page speed is measured in milliseconds. 40% of consumers will wait no more than 3 seconds before abandoning a website, so you may think that your website is fast because it loads in 4 seconds, but to Google that's too slow, and they may rank your website lower in search results.

Keep in mind that there are many factors that Google looks for when determining how and where to rank a website, and although page speed is major, it's not the only one. A website with a speed of 100% that's lacking in other areas could still end up ranking poorly. Read this blog to learn about some of Google's other search ranking factors.

Interesting Website Speed Statistics

• Google recommends a website page "response time" lower than 200 milliseconds (0.2 second). 100ms is ideal, and over 500ms is an issue. The top 20% of websites have a server response time of less than 312 milliseconds.
  • The server response time for THIS website is 93ms (according to DotCom-Tools Web Server Test) or 30ms (according to PageSpeed Insights), or 17ms (according to Windows "Ping" command). So if we average out those numbers to 45ms, that's more than twice as fast as Google's ideal response time!
• Only 15% of websites in the world have "acceptable" load times.
• 46% of websites take 6 to 10 seconds to load, which is more than double what Google recommends. And the average page loading time is 27.3 seconds on mobile devices and 10.3 seconds on desktops.
  • According to PageSpeed Insights, THIS website loads in 1.2 seconds on mobile, and an unheard of 0.3 second on desktops!
• 46% of customers will never visit a website again if it's loaded slowly in the past.
• Bounce rates (how quickly someone jumps off your page) increase by 32% when load time increases from 1 to 3 seconds, and by a whopping 90% when load time increases from 1 to 5 seconds!
• A one-second delay reduces customer satisfaction by 16%, conversions decrease by 7% for every second it takes for your website to load, and a 0.1 second improvement in your website's speed on mobile devices can improve conversions by 8.4%.
• The average page loading speed for websites ranked on Page 1 of Google Search results is 1.65 seconds.

How Can I Measure My Website's Speed?

• To measure your website load speed, don't rely on how long it takes to show up on your phone or laptop, as those numbers could be inaccurate due to your specific device, browser, or internet connection.
• Instead, head on over to pagespeed.web.dev and type in your website's complete URL (entire website address including the http or https, such as https://www.tbrookswebdesign.com), then hit the blue "Analyze" button.
• It can take 10 to 30 seconds to run, and the results are very easy to understand. In the performance score and Metrics section, Green is good, yellow is fair, and red is bad.
• The website's "overall" score is the Performance score in the circle at the top of the page. 0-49 is bad, 50-89 is fair, and 90-100 is excellent.
• Have fun checking out the page load speeds of your competitors' websites and you'll find that theirs are probably quite slow. Have you found any that score at least 95% and don't show any issues in red in the "Diagnostics" section?
• The performance score for THIS website is 100. Can't get any higher than that! Check it on the pagespeed website. This is a MAJOR achievement, as websites with a score of 100 are a rarity, even for Fortune 500 companies!

Yikes! My Website is Very Slow! How Can I Make My Slow Website Faster?

No Template Websites!

Most websites these days are "built" with templates, which means that most websites out there are quite slow (about 85% of them, according to the statistics above!) If your website was built with WordPress or any template website builder (Wix, Weebly, SquareSpace, even Dex Media/Thryv), it's going to be slow "out of the box" and there's very little that can be done to make it fast enough to satisfy Google's speed requirements for search ranking. This is due to proprietary coding, third-party widgets and add-ons, and required scripts that come with template sites.

Hire a Good Web Designer

The only way to get a super fast website is to have a web designer build you a manually hand-coded website. But of course that's not enough. The web designer needs to know all the many things that have to be done to make that website as fast as possible. Simply hand-coding a website won't be enough, and if it's not done properly, it could end up being slower than even the slowest template site! Very, very few web designers have the knowledge, patience and skill to do the many things that are necessary in making a website lightning fast.

Some Techniques that Web Designers Use to Make a Website Faster

Websites built with standard html and css tend to have the fastest load times, while websites that utilize php and a lot of Javascript and other third-party scripts are going to be slow. Videos, "bling", lots of animations and movement, and a lot of images can slow the loading of a website. Images MUST be resized and properly optimized (something hardly any web designers take the time to do). The more fonts on a website, the slower the load time, and self-hosted fonts (rather than embedding fonts from a site such as Google Fonts) can speed up the load time of a website. These are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to tricks that a good web designer might have up their sleeve to help your website load as quickly as possible.

Don't waste your money on a slow website that Google might rank at the bottom of search results. Work with a web designer who knows how to design a blazingly fast website. Be sure to ask them for the website addresses of other websites they've designed, then plug them in to the Pagespeed site mentioned above.

A big, attractive website that's as slow as molasses is like a beautiful race car with a 4-cylinder engine. It might get you where you want to go, but you'll probably end up last at the finish line!

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