Page Load Time and Rankings

It has not been made official, but something we should defiantly be keeping in mind, and that is page load times and its effect on rankings.

This could be something that comes into play in the future but, currently, here are a few reasons that would make us believe this to be true.

Matt Cutts, head of Google’s webspam team, has stated in past conferences that this would be a great idea to use as a ranking factor. This certainly leaves the possibility open, and with having such a strong influence at Google, who knows if this will be made official in the future?

Speaking of new tools, Google has released a tool called Page Speed as an add-on for Firefox browsers which can diagnose a number of elements impacting on page load times, such as JavaScript, CSS files and image file sizes. This could be just another really useful tool Google wishes to introduce to us, but I feel this is part of their strategy to speed up the internet experience.

Google announced last year that landing page load times will affect quality scores, where load time is defined as the amount of time it takes for a user to see the landing page after clicking on an ad.

Based on just some of the reasons above, sure, there are many more I could have talked about such as image optimization. I think page load times are very likely to be integrated into Google’s ranking in time and so, we should be ready for this as sites neglecting page load times will find themselves at a disadvantage if this is eventually rolled out.

Kenneth Berkley
Natural SEO Programmer