Slow response time and google
 

Have any of you guys actually noticed a diff. in your page load times and your rankings?

Example: Shitty host moved or upgraded your plan and page loads really increased and you improved rankings on the next update? :helpme

Yep, it matters. I try to make sure all of my sites score at least 85 on Google page speed. If it's a newer site, I aim for 90 or better but that's often difficult with legacy code.

I had two small niche sites that were 3rd page on shared hosting. I moved them to a dedicated and they were 1st page within a month or so without much new content. They just went from 60 something to 87 on page speed. Might just be a coincidence too. Who knows.

Thank you for your post. Looking for more hard evidence.

it has been a known ranking factor for a long time.

Yep, looking for more info. I have some sites on a shared host and that place sucks ballz. :Oh crap

also if your site loads slow the bounce rate will be bad and that is another factor

Correct..

I don't think you'll get a definitive answer to does slow respone time affect rankings because during the time taken for the experiment to run its course (weeks or months depending on your site) then Google will have updated its algorithms many times.

Slow downloads are a killer if you are doing Google Adwords and it was announced that it could impact on your seo rankings a couple of years back, and at the same time Google started issuing very specific advisories on how you can speed up your site in the webmaster tools and later via analytics.

My gut is that anything more than 5 seconds per page average can impact on your bounce rate(s), which is bad for rankings (indirectly) but to impact on your Google quality score it would have to be quite a severe problem because I have slow sites that rank quite well for sompetitive terms c. 10 s per page.

If someone has a page that ranks and can afford to fill it with shite, do a fetch as Google bot and get back to us, then that might help seal this one :)

Thank you for your great post.

Nice info dude. :thumbsup