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In short, yes, and more so now than ever. It used to be that all we needed to worry about were the more traditional SEO techniques like keywords and meta-data. It didn’t used to matter if your website was a bit of a lemon in terms of page load speed. Well that’s all changed.

Google decided that to offer its users the best search engine experience it would take the speed of a website into consideration when calculating the page rank of a search result. Here’s what Google say;

Google’s goal is to provide users with the most relevant results and a great user experience. Fast sites increase user satisfaction and improve the overall quality of the web, especially for those users with slow internet connections.

Websites are much richer these days in terms of content, with many more objects per page than a couple of years ago. Websiteoptimization say this;

Even in this era of widespread broadband, slow websites still frustrate users. The average web page more than tripled in the 5 years from 2003 to 2008 from 93.7K to 312K in total size. An upcoming survey will show the trend continuing at a similar rate. We have seen home pages in excess of 4 to 10 MB in file size with hundreds of objects! Even on a broadband connection these fat and complex web pages will tax the attention thresholds of users.

The average number of objects has grown from 25.7 to 49.9 during the same 5 year time period with no signs of slowing down. Object overhead now dominates page load delays in this era of higher speed connections.

The end result can be an increase in page size and load speed that can quickly grow and more often than not, go unnoticed. However, the people that will be sure to notice are the end users as their experience suffers.

As end users become more and more familiar with modern feature and content rich websites, they also become less tolerant of poor performance. If you leave them hanging around for a response they will often quit and simply visit the next website in the search results, leaving your website in a trail of negative perception.

The Need for Speed?

Numerous studies over the last few years have proven beyond doubt that users love fast websites. These results aren’t just psychological, they can be measured too. Here are some real world examples;

• Aesthetic Perception
• Bounce Rate
• Perceived Credibility
• Quality Rating
• User Frustration

There are other benefits to keeping your web content lean and mean. Many websites use a shared hosting package which typically have a bandwidth limit associated with them. As well as bandwidth, shared web hosting has a finite amount of resource in terms of concurrency and DB access before we even start to consider network latency.

Things to Consider

• Number of objects
• Image size v quality
• Use a CDN for jQuery
• Script order and placement
• Compression
• Server caching
• Response headers
• Enable browser caching

Here is a snapshot of one of our customers who was getting some rather intermittent responses from their website during the Summer, which just happens to be one of their busiest periods. The image was taken from the Google tool that is used to measures website performance and would have directly affected the website’s search ranking.

We re-platformed the website, migrated the hosting to a new provider and after some detailed analysis gave the website a “performance tune” to bring it back in line (during early August). The result is a far more responsive website, quicker page load speeds and a decrease in monthly bandwidth usage.

Revisit your website from a customer’s perspective and ask yourself a few simple questions;
  What is the end user experience of my website?
  When did I last measure my web page sizes?
  When did I last measure my website speed?
  How can I improve them to help with SEO and search ranking?

Conclusion

A well constructed, tested and tuned website will perform better and if using a shared hosting package, may well save money. These days users will not tolerate poor performing websites, so keep your content as small and light as possible. The speed of your website is a factor in your SEO search ranking.

Need any more persuading? Take a look at this powerful Speed Chart Infographic from Google.

Feel free to comment on this article or get in touch if you would like any further information.