There are various versions regarding the ideal definition of website speeds, but the concept the speed at which the content of a search result can be seen by a person refers to website speed, features in them all. And with Google announcing this very website speed to have a significant impact on the search ranking of a website in the year of 2010, more and more websites started to work on their loading speed. Even companies like web design company in Kolkata took the responsibility of increasing the website speed upon them like never before. But in case you’re among those who still wonder how the speed of a website impacts ion its Google ranking, then you have come to the right place.
What Is Page Load Time?
As Google has not provided any clear definition of what page load time is, two different measurements fall under the speed measurement of a web page, one is document complete time and another is fully rendered time. While by fully rendered time it is the time that is referred to which is required for downloading and displaying all the page analytic trackers, advertisements, and images; document complete time more of covers the time required for a page to load before one can start entering or clicking on data. It is by evaluating the correlation between the two that it can be said whether these two factors impact on the website ranking or not.
Size of The Web Page
A page size refers to all the bytes that are downloaded to automatically to render complete look to the web page. Be it the ads on the page or the images, the fonts or the third party widgets, everything together makes a web page and the poorer the size of this web page will be the lower ranking will it get due to poor page quality. And those who come with lesser resources, often improve the quality of the web page, which automatically increases the complexity related to it and due to poor focus on the page’s optimization, it fails to secure a satisfactory rank on the Google search results.
Total Image Content
By analyzing the total size of all the images that are there on a web page, it has been observed that any website that that has more images to load, operates slowly compared to those websites that have lesser or smaller size of images. However, comparing the findings with the rendered time, it can be said that there is no direct correlation found between page loading time and search engine ranking.
TTFB or Time to First Byte
With the finding pointing out to no established relation between page load time, both rendered and document complete, with the search rankings, researchers have revealed the truth that it is because of tough competition for the generic searches, that smaller ranking factors like website speed are standing out more.
Though it may be surprising, however, there’s a more direct co-relation found between the TTFB or time-to-first-byte and the higher ranking in the search engine results. Any website that comes with appropriate back-end infrastructure and server deliver a web content more quickly and enjoys a higher Google ranking than those that are slow. Unlike the conventional wisdom, therefore, more focus needs to be there on the back-end performance of a website, than the front-end ones.
Yes, a poorly performing website naturally generates poor experience among the users as well as a poor promotional exposure in the search results. But at the end, it is more of the TTFB that impacts the search rankings, as Google can capture this particular matric more easily and quickly. Whether it’s by hiring agencies like web design company in Kolkata or researching on your own if you are skilled in this particular field, to boost the search engine ranking of your website, therefore, paying attention to TTFB along with a little on page speed can boost the ranking of your web page.
