Do site load times have an impact on Google rankings?

It’s time for another round for Grab Bag questions. We record all these questions on one day and send them out on the course on many different days. Last time everyone complained they saw the same red polo shirt for 30 – 40 days in a row, so I actually brought a bunch of different shirts so we’ll just sprinkle it up and mix it up a little bit. So you’ll get a little more variety in your shirt. So let’s start with the first question from Deepesh in New York. Deepesh asks “What impact do site load times have on Google rankings?”

The short answer is, none, right now. Now let’s give it a little more color. Of course if the site takes so long to load that we can’t even fetch it, Googlebot can’t get a copy of it then that will have an effect on your rankings because your site is essentially timing out. So if your site is taking 20 or 30 seconds to respond to request that could be a problem. But if your site takes 1 second versus 2 seconds that has no difference what so ever on Google’s rankings. So that’s the short answer. Now let’s give a little more color. If you haven’t heard Larry Page has talked about how he wants the web to be. He wants the web to be really fast, almost as fast as a magazine like as soon as you turn the page you are ready for the next page. And so chrome was built with that philosophy, we want to make the web really fast make it a really good experience so currently site loading times have no effect on Google’s rankings. What might happen in the future, I don’t know. I can certainly imagine Google saying while we like the web to be faster, what can we do to encourage people to make their sites faster and how can we get the word out, that if your site is faster people will be happier and more likely to come back to your site or use your site more often. We’ve seen that on our own site. So it is interesting that we want the web to be fast and we want sites to load quickly. Right now it’s not at all affecting our rankings. For the future who knows what might be involved, personally I think it’s a great idea if you can look at some other ways to make your site a little faster. For example don’t include 40 different java script files. You can compact those all down into one java script or one CSS file. Don’t include huge images when your image size is only set to something tiny. There are lots of ways to minify or compact your pages to make them return faster for users. You can Gzip pages for example. So there’s a lot of ways to look at that’s really good for user experience. Don’t worry about from the search engine ranking perspective right now but it probably can make a really big difference for your users.

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