Why having a speedy site matters to Google

If you’ve been around here for a while, you know that I try not to get too technical in the SEO content we discuss because I know it can be overwhelming. However, there are a few parts of technical SEO that are important for you to understand, and this is one of them. Google wants your website to be speedy, and if it’s not, that will impact your rankings. Why does having a speedy site matter to Google? 

Google wants your website to be fast because it’s better for the customer.

Think about the last time you were searching for information in Google, and you clicked on a website, and it felt like it took forever for the page to load. Did you stay there and wait, or click back and try something else? Often people will click back and try another website instead of the original one that doesn’t load fast enough. And Google knows that. They’re less likely to rank you high if your website is slow because it’s not a good user experience. No one wants a turtle-paced website. 

What makes a website slow? 

The biggest culprit in website speed is often the size of the image files. Big picture files take a LONG time to download, which can slow your website down a lot. 

Another issue can be the number of plug-ins on a site, especially WordPress sites. Some plug-ins have a lot of extra code, which slows things down.  

What can you do to speed up your website? 

Start by checking to see what your page load times are like now. You can use a tool like Pingdom or the Google Page Speed test to see how your website is doing. The report will tell you both how you're doing and what needs to be fixed to improve your page speed. 

If your page load time is slow because of images, you’ll want to compress them. You can use a program like JPEG Mini or Photoshop to preserve the image quality but reduce the size. Your report may show other items you need to do to speed things up - you can hire a developer to help you with that. Most times, the main issue is