Slow Websites Will Cost You More Money

Written by Steve Burge

Google have just announced that the speed of your site will start directly affecting your profits. If you're using Adwords, fast landing pages will lead to a better Quality Score. Slow sites may well end up paying more for their clicks. More from the Google Adwords blog:

Why are we doing this?

Two reasons: first, users have the best experience when they don't have to wait a long time for landing pages to load. Interstitial pages, multiple redirects, excessively slow servers, and other things that can increase load times only keep users from getting what they want: information about your business. Second, users are more likely to abandon landing pages that load slowly, which can hurt your conversion rate.

This is really confirmation of something we've known for a long time. Although theres a server full of information about you in Google headquarters, there's only piece of data about your website that they consider important enough to put in their search results - the size of your website.

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Your Comments (9)

Anne Hennegar

March 18, 2008

Good article. I'm a user of Anthony's page cache component and I'm awaiting the production release of Query cache.

Another article with good resources is one by Alex Rimm-Kaufmann which is on Search Engine Land
http://searchengineland.com/080316-235959.php

David Towers

March 24, 2008

Steve, do you have your own server? Could you give us a run down of how you went about sourcing it and annual costs please?

Steve Burge

March 24, 2008

Hi David

We do have a custom server that runs well over 100 sites. We weren't a model of professionalism when it came to sourcing a new server. Our previous host melted down and after 3 to 4 days of so of almost constant downtime we jumped on finding a replacement. I took the advice of someone I respect and moved to Rochen.com. We almost certainly overpay but we've not had more than a tiny glitch in almost a year now. The reliability is worth the price.

We've sourced other servers for clients since, ranging from $200 per month for a VPS at Godaddy to $600 at Rackspace.

David Towers

March 24, 2008

OK thanks for that info Steve. Seems like a private server would be overkill for the sites I'm hosting at the moment then...

Steve Burge

March 24, 2008

Quite possibly - even with well over 100 sites we're comfortably inside the server's capacity.

Financially, when we moved we set up a bunch of Adsense sites that pay the hosting bill for the others on the server.

eric

April 04, 2008

After I enabled cache on my Joomla site my page now loads in 1-2 seconds as opposed to 4-5. I know your guide says that pages should load in a second or less, what does Google consider to be a fast loading page?

Steve Burge

April 04, 2008

Hi Eric

Its hard to give a precise figure as server speed can vary even on the same server and there are lots more variables to go through into the equation.

Some very popular sites like ESPN.com can get away with being over 100k. However as a general rule of thumb I'd aim for under 40k and even under 30k.

jono

April 24, 2009

After some feedback I discovered our website was loading a lot slower in the US, where most of our sales happen. Before this issue I really had no idea websites could load at different speeds in different countries - sure pays to listen to customer feedback.

We were lucky because we use a dedicated server so we just put aptimize on it - a small piece of software that goes on the server (so i'm told by my tech guy) - this significantly improved the speed.

If you have a shared hosting account there's still a lot you can do - takes a bit of tweaking and testing (try using firebug/yslow to identify what's causing the weight on your page load) but focus on the countries where you do the most sales and check out you website speed there - you'll be very surprised. The important point is slow sites cost sales and you might not even be aware that you have a problem.

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