How Load Speed Can Tank Your Google Rankings

A very important Google ranking factor is the load speed of your website…how fast your web page loads on desktops and phones.

If your site is on an overloaded server, your site will slow down considerably as your traffic increases.

Shared Hosting: Good, Bad, Ugly

The most common kind of hosting is shared hosting. Shared hosting means that your website shares the same server and IP address as several, up to hundreds, and even thousands of websites.

All the data for these websites goes in and out though the single server. If there are hundreds or even thousands of websites on one server your website’s load speed will be severely impacted when those websites have heavy traffic.

How to Test Your Website’s Server

I used  TCPIP Utils  but you can find other testing sites by searching for “domain neighbors lookup”.

I tested three websites, my site (#1), a friend’s site (#2) and a new client’s site (#3).

#1:  JohnBolyard.com

Server Test

Tested with TCPIP Utils .

JohnBolyard.com shares the server with 4 other domains. This is a very small number of sites for a shared server. I never have downtime and my site loads quickly on desktops and phones.

Load Speed

This load speed test was done on Pingdom.com with their Pingdom Website Speed Test.

The load stats are:

1. Performance 81 out of 100
2. Requests: 93 (how many specific elements are needed to load this page)
3. Load time: 3.38 seconds
4. Page size: 1.9 mb

What this means.

My stats are good, particularly because I have almost 100 page elements that need to load before the page is completely displayed.

My pages have a lot of content which increases the page elements. I can see that I can improve the load speed by reducing the number of page elements (requests to the server). Requests are the  individual elements needed for a specific page, like images, scripts, content etc.

Server Test

Tested with TCPIP Utils .

This is a  friend’s site. Her website is on shared hosting with 172 sites on the server.

This is an average number of sites on a reputable, reliable shared hosting service.

Load Speed

This load speed test was done on Pingdom.com with their Pingdom Website Speed Test.

The load stats are:

1. Performance: 85 out of 100
2. Requests: 43 (how many specific elements are needed to load this page)
3. Load time: 2.85 seconds
4. Page size: 1.3 mb

What this means.

My friends stats are very good. She has kept the number of requests per page low and her load speed is under 3 seconds. Good work!

Server Test

Tested with TCPIP Utils .

This website shares a server with 2,105 websites! That’s really crowded! Traffic going in and out will get congested very quickly. This website will have real difficulty ranking for any important keywords. Due to the very slow load speed, their visitors will leave before the page loads. Google won’t serve up these pages. This needs to be fixed asap.

Load Speed

This load speed test was done on Pingdom.com with their Pingdom Website Speed Test.

The stats are:

1. Performance: 66 out of 100
2. Requests: 60 (how many specific elements are needed to load this page)
3. Load time: 14.19 seconds
4. Page size: 803kb

 What this means.

The first thing we’re going to do for this client is move them to a new host. You can see that they have 60 requests (page elements) for a total page size of under 1mb. Yet the load speed is over 14 seconds. This site will never rank for any significant keywords until this problem is solved.

Did your website fail the test?

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