The Effect of Site Speed on SEO

This is a question we get asked time and time again when it comes to SEO and in some extreme cases, we are approached by clients who are worried about the addition of engaging features such as videos, galleries, animations and portfolios.

Many owners of websites believe that image or video based features will cause the site to load slowly and thus cause them to fall in those all-important search engine rankings and so they will settle for a static, simple website which then depletes user engagement.

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The truth is, while a slower loading website isn’t ideal for your user experience in the eyes of search engines such as Google, Bing & Yahoo, the website speed situation just isn’t as simple as that. As an agency who do both website design and SEO, our job is to find the right balance between user experience and search engine performance. It is true that sometimes these two things are at odds with each other, but we find more often than not, that Google is far more concerned with relevant content and a great user experience (UX) than the just speed of your website.

With these factors in mind, we focus solely on delivering relevant content to the user in an engaging format and we have managed to deliver many first positions on search engines with this methodology, despite the inclusion of video, images, portfolios, animations, social feeds, review widgets and many other features shown on the front end of the website. We have consistently managed to get our SEO clients high rankings and beat their competition to those top spots – even when a competitor website loads milliseconds faster.

That’s not to say we don’t optimize sites to load faster, this is best practice for any web designer or developer as at the very least it delivers a better user experience. Tools can be used to optimize image sizes, minimize javascript and optimise or delete redundant code (to name a few).

Conclusion

The best approach is really to cover all bases, both technical and UX based. SEO is an ever changing game of chess with the search engines, the rules of which are set by an algorithm that no one can accurately predict, and that comes direct from Google, sometimes the search specialists at Google don’t know what their AI (Artificial Intelligence) based search algorithm is going to do next! The Google algorithm can change over 200 times in a month. What works today for ranking your site, won’t necessarily work tomorrow, so a comprehensive technical, content and UX driven approach to SEO is always the best solution, after all search engines are there to answer their users questions, if you have the answer, and Google (other search engines are available) likes the answer, you will rank!

After all its no good having a website that doesn’t inform and engage.

If you would like more advice on how to get your website performing in search engines, give us a call on 01382 918525.