The speed of your site is becoming increasingly important for your SEO

Something that has become increasingly clear in recent years is that the speed of your pages and website plays a bigger and bigger role in your search engine optimization. And there’s a lot you can do.

I was recently asked how fast a site should load for Google to like it. Unfortunately, the answer is: the faster, the better. This is a change compared to the past.

Previously, we could see that there was a threshold for how fast a page needed to load; as long as you were above that threshold, you did well in the search results. A slow page would lose positions, but one that met the limit ranked just as before. That’s no longer the case.

It has now become increasingly clear that the faster your site loads, the better your search engine optimization. Of course, this largely depends on your competitors—it’s them you need to outperform. It may not be necessary to beat every site on the internet, but if you want an advantage, you should be faster than your competitors.

As a side note, I’d like to say that, unfortunately, there are two things on many sites that tend to slow things down significantly: I’m talking about Google’s tools—Analytics, Remarketing tracking—and Facebook’s pixel. Even on small, fast-loading sites without lots of requests, these can often cause slowdowns, including on this site.

So there are plenty of reasons to speed up your site, and Google Search Console is a great place to start—you can get suggestions for improvements there. A personal favorite of mine is Pingdom, which I find gives a better picture of what the problems on a site actually are.