The other day, in the web design forums, the topic of a website’s page performance affecting SEO rankings came up. A member posted several points regarding the subject and several tips you could employ to help boost your website’s load times. With quicker load times comes happier visitors and, hopefully, better search engine rankings.
Over the following days, during my casual internet browsing, an excellent article on SmashingMagazine discussed exactly this topic, in more detail.
Website performance is a hugely important topic, so much so that the big companies of the Web are obsessed with it. For the Googles, Yahoos, Amazons and eBays, slow websites mean fewer users and less happy users and thus lost revenue and reputation.
In your case, annoying a few users wouldn’t be much of a problem, but if millions of people are using your product, you’d better be snappy in delivering it. For years, Hollywood movies showed us how fast the Internet was: time to make that a reality.
Even if you don’t have millions of users (yet), consider one very important thing: people are consuming the Web nowadays less with fat connections and massive computers and more with mobile phones over slow wireless and 3G connections, but they still expect the same performance. Waiting for a slow website to load on a mobile phone is doubly annoying because the user is usually already in a hurry and is paying by the byte or second. It’s 1997 all over again.
The article outlines several important factors in website page performance and the effects it may have on your SEO rankings on Google, Yahoo, and Bing. I hope you find it helpful.
I’m debating writing several in-depth articles regarding this topic and many others, what do you think? Would you read them?
