the impact of website speed on search ranking - 2013
DESCRIPTION
Zoompf analyzes over 100,000 URLs to discover any correlation between website performance and search ranking position.TRANSCRIPT
Mark IshamCEO, Zoompf
How Website Speed Actually Impacts Search Ranking
You may have heard that here at Google we're obsessed with speed, in our products and on the web. As part of that effort, today we're including a new signal in our search ranking algorithms: site speed. Site speed reflects how quickly a website responds to web requests.
“
”Google Webmaster BlogApril 9, 2010
Back in 2010, Google said site speed is a ranking factor. Google’s Matt Cutts said expect something similar to come to mobile search soon.
This morning, Google announced demotion factors for mobile sites, but they did not announce site speed as one of those demotion factors. That is because that feature is not yet live but it is coming soon, and Matt wants webmasters and SEOs to prepare.
“
”Announcements from SMX AdvancedJune 11, 2013
• Document Complete?• Visually Complete?• Time to Render Start?
• Time to First Byte?• Google Analytics?• What’s “good enough”?
2000 Random :• HDTV• Durable power of
attorney• Sporting goods stores• …
Top 50 Results for Each:• http://atg.sd.gov/Seniors/
EstatePlanning/PowerofAttorney.aspx • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Power_of_attorney • http://www.nolo.com/legal-
encyclopedia/durable-power-of-attorney-health-finances-29579.html
• …
X =
100,000 Test Pages
Search Term Rank URL
HDTV 1 url1
HDTV 2 url2
… 50 …
Sporting Goods Stores 1
Sporting Goods Stores 2
… 50
http://zoompf.com/search-ranking-factors
30 “Private” WebpageTest Instances on EC2
url1
url2
…
url1 5.1 …
url2 3.2 …
… 2.5 …
Metrics Captured
• Document Complete Time• Fully Loaded Time• Time to First Byte• Time to Fully Rendered• Bytes Downloaded
• Requests Made• Total Image Size• Gzip Savings• Minify Amount• More…
What Does this Mean?
• TTFB is easiest to measure• Top performers invest in infrastructure• Data is correlative only!
– Relevancy remains king
Our Recommendation:TTFB of 500 ms or less!
What About the Long Tail?(Searches with 4 or more keywords)
What is Time to First Byte?
TTFB = Latency + Server Response Time
Measuring Latency
1. Use PING2. Goal: 100 ms or less
Latency: Use a CDN
Akamai, Cloudfront, CloudFlare, …
Server Response Time
Server Response Time = TTFB - LATENCY
TTFB = Latency + Server Response Time
So…
Tips• Use WebPageTest for TTFB• Use PING for Latency
Goal
Get Under Here!
TTFB = Latency + Server Response Time
(TTFB) 500 ms = (Ping) 100 ms + (Server Time) 400 ms
Optimizing Server Components
• Big Topic, out of scope• Fast Webservers• Responsive Databases• Optimized code• Use caching!– (Expires or cache-control: max-age)
Other Interesting Data
Metric Value
Document Complete 8.5 s
Fully Rendered 12.0 s
Time to First Byte 874 ms
Page Size 1.42 MB
Server Requests 104
Total Image Size 492 kb
(Average across all 100k results)
References
• Moz Study: http://moz.com/blog/how-website-speed-actually-impacts-search-ranking
• Time to First Byte: http://moz.com/blog/improving-search-rank-by-optimizing-your-time-to-first-byte
• Study Data: http://zoompf.com/search-ranking-factors• Zoompf Free Tool: http://zoompf.com/free
