How Website load speed affects search engine rankings.

CLICK HERE to test the Load Time of Your Website by Host-Tracker.com

Your Website Site Speed Load Time – how long it takes a web page to load and show up for people in a web browser window – is now one of Google’s ranking factors.  That means Google takes site speed into account when deciding how high a site should show up in search results.  Very slow sites will have a much harder time beating out its competitors.

If visitors have to wait too long for your site to load, they’re more likely to leave quickly, and less likely to do what you want them to do – like buy your product or service, contact you for a quote, sign up for your newsletter or download your e-book etc…

Google provides a tool which helps find areas of your web page that may be improved to help shorten the load time. Google Page Speed Online Tool

Check how fast your website loads !

You can test how long it takes your site to load with various tools.  One favorite is Pingdom’s site speed test.  If you use Google Webmaster Tools, look under “Labs” and click “Site Performance.” Another way to test how fast (or slow) your web page loads is to use different computers at different locations with different browsers. This will give and idea of how long an actual viewer is waiting to see your website. To check how fast a website loads from different locations from your own computer some webmasters like to use MegaProxy.com. MegaProxy is a service which allows you to view your website from different locations.

However; for SEO Google Page Rank we have to believe that the “Google Page Speed Online Tool” mentioned above is what Google is using to measure your website page load time.

What’s considered slow?

In my opinion, a website that loads within 2 seconds is doing well. A site that loads in 2 to 4 seconds isn’t really fast, but is acceptable providing you have a bunch of needed relative information on the web page.

A website that takes more than 5 seconds or more to load is likely to push potential visitors on to the next web page viewing option which could very well be your competitors, and may be suffer a lower ranking.  If your site takes more than 7 seconds to load, you really need to speed it up.

For more information on how to improve your site speed,

read AboutUs’s 6 Easy Ways To Improve Your Site Speed, for SEO.

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