How important is page speed for SEO?

Ashley Bryan

Published On May 07,2021

There are many factors that can make up positive SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) for a website. Quality content and posting regular content is definitely a major player. Developing a good linking structure – internally, externally (in the form of backlinks) – is another very powerful way of achieving good rankings in the search engines.

In fact, there are numerous things website owners, employees and SEO specialists can do to improve a website’s SEO overall, but in this article, we’re going to devote some space to the importance of page loading speed.

Is page speed a key component to good SEO? Does it really matter if your website is slow to load?

Speed Is Vital In An Impatient World

As society becomes more high-tech and the population gets more and more used to instant gratification and results, people have become way less patient; particularly when it comes to anything related to technology. We expect speed and we want rapid results all the time.

Even if Google and co didn’t care less about how fast the pages of your website load, the people visiting your site do. If they search for certain information and content from your site shows up, when they click the link, if the page takes a long time to load, the visitor will become impatient, click off your site and visit a faster site with similar information.

What this means for you, the website owner of a slow site, is that you’re going to lose traffic and lose potential customers and business. This is the exact opposite of what you want to achieve. You want your website to attract visitors and keep them coming back.

So, regardless of what the search engines do or don’t care about, page speed is vital from a visitor perspective and from the viewpoint of website owners.

Does Google Rank Sites Based On Page Loading Speed?

Yes, Google does use page speed as a ranking factor. It’s built into the Google algorithms to monitor page loading speeds when the bots crawl websites. In fact, page speed ranks highly on the list of requirements for SEO and how it ranks websites.

If your website is suffering from poor loading speeds, this is something that needs to be addressed. Perhaps it’s just a couple of pages that are slow to load. If that’s the case, it’s not necessarily a major issue, but if many pages on your site take forever to open, or your entire website is slow, you’ve got major problems.

Slow websites are not going to rank highly, so you’ll be missing out on loads of traffic due to both poor rankings, as well as impatient visitors.

Reasons for slow loading speeds vary, but often it will have something to do with a feature-heavy website theme, or images that are large in size.

Speed Up Your Website With Expert SEO Services

If you don’t know how to improve your website’s speed, consult with a SEO expert. They’ll be able to pinpoint the problem and put in motion a plan to resolve the issue.