Having a web presence is essential in today’s world. But it doesn’t stop there: People have to see your web site and interact with it if your is going to impact on new and returning clients.

We’ve known for some years now that page load speed is a Google ranking factor. With the increasing use of mobile search (smart phones and tablets), it has become even more important, especially for small local businesses. If your pages don’t start and finish loading within a few seconds, several studies have shown that mobile visitors will simply click away to the next item in the search results.

Web Hosting for Optimized Page Load Speed
by Adam Thompson, Search Engine Journal
December 10, 2015

This study shows no correlation between page complete load times and Google rankings, but it did find a correlation for time to first byte. Another study also found no correlation between rankings and page load time. It seems likely that the impact of page load speed on rankings is very small, so as SEOs it’s important that we don’t present page load speed as a major factor in rankings.

On the other hand, the impact of page load speed on users is likely much greater than its impact on Google rankings. Multiple studies have consistently documented the impact of page load speed on user experience – slow load times lead to user abandonment and decreased conversion rates. Scale does matter when discussing this benefit, though. An incremental improvement in conversion rate (which is huge for large e-retailers) may translate to a very small monetary benefit for websites with small traffic numbers.

Thompson goes on to discuss the specific ways in which your hosting service and/or plan contributes to load speed.

Read more…

There are several factors that affect your page load speed: One of these is the type of web hosting and the specific web host you use. There are also several page design and page content factors that can be optimized for page load speed. At Psychlinks Website Design & Management Services, these and other Search Engine Optimization factors are built in to our work on your site from the very beginning.