Website speed and its effect on the Google rankings
Almost everyone needs a website to make a mark in this digital age. But what a lot of people don’t know is that their page’s ranking on Google is also governed by something called the “website speed”. Website speed refers to the time it takes for a particular website to load, time to download anything from the website and the time it takes to retrieve answers to any query asked on the website.
Factors that affect speed
The server you use
It majorly decides the speed of your website. Ideally your server should be up almost all the time — this ensures your page is retrieved quickly. If your server is slow, the responses will always be slow no matter how much you try to optimise the website.
Content uploaded
The type of content on your website and its size also matters. When your files are larger in size, your site becomes slower and you don’t want this. Always look at compressing images and texts so your website remains fast.
Browser used
Another factor that affects website speed is the browser that the users use. You can always optimize your website to perform best with a particular browser like Chrome or Firefox or anything else.
The traffic that comes to your website
When too many people come to your page, excess bandwidth is needed and this would slow down the whole website experience for all users. The ideal solution is to adjust your bandwidth settings to vary with the traffic to your website.
Note: Avoid using software’s and plug-ins that are slow and take time to load for example Flash.
There are several reasons why this website speed is important and how it affects the ranking of your webpage. There is always a direct correlation between the time taken to load a webpage and the page’s ranking. This holds true for Google searches with short keywords and also longer ones. Google does not openly accept that page load time is a factor in their ranking but we know that website speed is definitely a factor.
Which website speed is used?
There are multiple ways by which a website speed can be calculated by companies. The most common measurement is the time taken for the first byte to load and it is called TTFB. Majority search engines use TTFB as measurement metric for their ranking. Google uses TTFB because perhaps this is the easiest to measure. The very reason that website time is important for page rankings is because it is an integral part of the user experience.
in addition to TTFB, there are few other key parameters like Code to text ratio, site responsiveness, image content etc.
Let us discuss what each one of those terms mean:
Text to code (HTML) ratio.
Many websites are written in language called HTML that has code and text. The text means the content which is displayed on the website and importantly backend code isn’t displayed. Generally the ratio of text to code should ideally be 50 to 70%. The high ranking websites keep more text and less code. Is this ideal?
• It indicates that website are meant for people and not for robots and crawlers.
• This ratio helps in ensuring a better user experience.
• Keeping less code makes the website speed faster and it is very important for page’s ranking.
Website Responsiveness
When a visitor clicks on a link of a page or enters any data, the site generally takes some time to respond to the user. Responsiveness meaning this speed. This is related to website speed and therefore important for ranking. While developing the site we need ti make sure site is responsive which will help better ranking.
Image Content
Images are heavy compared to contents hence take more time to load. Lots of images reduces the website speed and this impacts rankings. High professionals need to take care of these aspects and they reduce the size of image by compressing them and use appropriate frames like JPGE.
With this explanation we know that what is website speed and how important it is to ranking of your website on search engines like Google or any other. Emphasis should be given to optimise the website speed. Care should be taken to check HTML code errors, remove unwanted lines of codes, contents should be unique or not copied, limit the no. of images, remove excess space, avoid tables and charts, use CSS for the style and formatting and keep page’s size as small as possible.
By Taking care and following all these useful tips, you can ensure that your website is fast and the page’s ranking is right. on top of all your competitors.
Amit Mandal is a professional author and a blogger. He is a native Indian person and enjoying his time in writing quality blogs. He is writing terrific articles on Digital Marketing, Avemfly Technology is best SEO Company In Delhi. For more background information, please view our profile on Google+ or visit our website @Google+ Over Here
