Rank Better in Google with a Fast Site

May 3, 2024/Paul Mycroft

When you are searching for something on the Internet, for many people, the first place they go to is Google. The process goes something like this:

  1. Type keyword phrase in to google.com or google.ca
  2. Hit “Search”
  3. Results appear in Google’s endless scrolling page

Google logoBut how does Google rank those results? It uses a large number of factors to determine how to rank search engine results, more than 200 in fact. Typically, these factors are either related to the content of a web page (the body copy, its web address, the titles and headlines) or are measurements of the authenticity of the website itself (age of the domain name, number and quality of inbound links, etc.).

Some factors are more important than others, a very important one being site load speed. But why is a fast-loading site important to a visitor?

A slow-loading website results in a poor user experience and sites with poor user experiences deserve less promotion in search results.

What’s the First Step?

Check the load speed on your website using a free tool such as Pingdom. Here are the results for our website:

Load speed PMD

And the results for Market 2 All, our e-newsletter site:

Load speed M2A

Clearly, we are doing something right but it could always improve.

What Can You Do?

First place to check is your web host. Ask them what they can do to help speed up your site.

A local web hosting company – Island Hosting – performs “image caching” to speed up hosting where images are cached on the load balancer using Varnish, which alleviated disk i/o on the servers making for faster hosting.

Huh? We thought you would ask.

This means that their server loads your website images faster than normal using a special tool, which results in faster load times and hence, better rankings in Google.

What Else?

  • If you are running WordPress, see if there is a new version of your theme
  • Update your WordPress version and its plugins to the latest versions
  • Ask your domain name host if there is anything they can do
  • Remove heavy graphics from your website such as gradient backgrounds, shadows on images, optimize your JPEGs
  • Start riding your bicycle to work (that one was just to help YOU load faster)

If you need help speeding up your site, let us know.

Posted in

Paul Mycroft

Having emigrated from south London, England, Paul has moved between cities in North America, building a loyal following since starting the business back in 2002. Many US and Canadian clients are with him today who were there from day one.

2 Comments

  1. Rob Turner on August 7, 2014 at 10:18 am

    Hello,

    Its true a fast site load does better in Google and other search engines, I personally like to use gtmetrix.com to test a site, check the time line to make sure all content loads and you don’t have any 404 errors on content which can drag load time down.

    GTMetrix will give you information like adding ExpiresHeaders into the htaccess for file caching, compressing images on a website using a WordPress plugin like smush.it, using imsanity plugin to stop serving up over sized images and save on bandwidth.

    Also, most modern browsers like Chrome, Firefox and even the new IE have great web developer tools under the F12 key. Loading a site using these tools can help you identify slow plugins, misbehaving Javascripts and generally debug things that might not be working right.

    Thanks,
    Rob Turner
    Islandnet.com



  2. Paul Mycroft on August 7, 2014 at 5:40 pm

    Hi Rob,

    Great answer and thank you!