Pubcon was roughly a week ago in Las Vegas, and in case you’re not familiar with it, it’s one of the handful of popular must stops in the world of SEO conferences. While I didn’t go to Pubcon, I did follow the coverage and something posted on the SEOMoz.org blog really caught my attention:
Web Page Load Time can Positively Influence Rankings
Maile Ohye actually mentioned this at SMX East in New York, but Matt Cutts repeated it again today. In a nutshell – while slow page load times won’t negatively impact your rankings, fast load times may have a positive effect. This comes on a day when the Google Chrome blog introduced their new SPDY research project. I’m particularly happy about this news, because it’s also true that load times have a positive second-order effect on SEO. Pingomatic recently published some excellent research on load times from Akamai noting the expectations of users for faster web browsing have doubled in the past 2 years. In addition, fast loading pages are, in my opinion, considerably more likely to earn links, retweets and other forms of sharing than their slow-loading peers. This tool from Pingdom is a great place to start testing your own site.
This is incredible information for anyone who either depends on good rankings in a competitive space or hosts those sites.
This is a very interesting way to look at it, so Google won’t actually apply a negative score to you in the alorithim for being on a slow server or having a poorly constructed page that loads slowly, BUT will REWARD ALL OF YOUR COMPETITORS who don’t make the same mistake. Well this is liking entering a NASCAR race with crappy tires. Sure you’re allowed to do it, but you can’t win that way.
Barely a day goes by where there’s not another major story that shows with focus and proper explanation, a higher end, faster, high quality hosting infratstructure, pays for itself many times over on an ROI basis, versus the 10′s of dollars a month that can be saved by doing hosting on the cheap.
I hope when we look back in a couple years that the hosting industry will have turned a corner in it’s race to the bottom and will be focusing on the high quality side of the market and showing their customers how an extra $40 or $50 a month in hosting fees can provide data security, proper backups and direct ROI on their customers sites.
About Rick Wilson
Rick Wilson is the Executive Vice President for Miva Merchant a popular online shopping cart software.
Rick has been with Miva Merchant since 1999 when he began at the original Miva Corporation as an outside sales representative and took over as Vice President of Sales in 2002 and ultimately as Executive Vice President in 2007.
Rick's more than 12 years of executive-level sales and marketing experience also includes his tenure as Vice President of Sales and Marketing for Providence Systems, a privately held sales training company. At Providence Systems, Rick developed and executed the sales and marketing strategies that helped lead a successful corporate turnaround between 1998 and 2002.
Through his WHIR blog, Rick will cover ecommerce trends, products and services from the perspective of the online merchant. He will focus on best practice thinking, tools that help them improve their business and be on the look-out for the information that provides merchants the competitive edge to be successful.
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