This is John Locke, and I want to address a question that I saw on Reddit yesterday.
This was in the SEO channel, and they were talking about, "How fast does your site need
to be?" or ""What role does speed play in your website ranking?"
So for those who are wondering what that means, it means how fast does a web page on your
website get downloaded?
So how important is speed?
Here's the thing.
We've talked about it in a previous video, how site speed affects your SEO.
But from what I've seen, as fast as you need to be is fast enough to be faster than your
competitors in your niche.
So, if you are in aerospace manufacturing, your website should download faster than all
the other top websites in aerospace manufacturing.
If you are in a field like, and we'll just make this up, let's say that you're in accounting.
We'll say that all the accounting websites download really slow, they're all on really
poor hosting.
There's a lot of code inefficiencies.
Your site only needs to be fast enough to beat the fastest of them to do well in SEO.
Google places websites in different categories.
So, as long as you're beating your competitors, that's good.
That said, I do believe that having a fast website is going to improve the customer experience
of your site.
It's going to improve the user experience of your website.
And it's going to make people want to be on your site longer.
So, if your site is taking five, or six, or seven seconds to load a page -- that's not
good.
That's not good, my friends.
And what you should do is take a look at a couple of areas.
The most important things that seems to affect SEO, from what studies have shown is a metric
called Time To First Byte.
Now, if you go into Chrome, and you right-click the page, and you open the Dev Tools, and
you click on a tab called Network -- in Chrome Dev Tools -- and then load your page, you'll
notice that there are a bunch of files loading.
Those are all the files that it takes to make up your page.
So if you click on the very first one, it should be your domain name.
And then you'll see there are some graphs showing how long it took to look up your domain
name, the DNS records.
And then a metric called TTFB, which is Time To First Byte.
That, if it is somewhat low, that's a good sign.
Generally what you should aim for is a below 300 milliseconds.
But there's not a lot that you can do at your level.
It's going to come down to your hosting.
I've seen websites that where they were on really poor cPanel hosting, and we moved them
over to a good host, something like Kinsta or WP Engine, and that Time To First Byte
decreased rapidly.
And it helped their SEO, I believe.
The second thing you should look at when it comes to site speed is code inefficiencies.
Now if you have a template that you bought from somewhere like ThemeForest, or Envato
-- chances are that your site is very bloated.
Now, these templates are very popular because they let people DIY -- do ti themselves -- or
it allows agencies to do a lot of drag and drop building.
The problem is, these things get loaded down with everything AND the kitchen sink.
They are Swiss army knife themes.
And ll those components are loading on every page.
So that's one thing to look at.
Get with a web developer, have them take a look and evaluate your website, especially
the speed.
But the last, and most important component of speed is your hosting.
If you are on five-dollar a month hosting, or ten-dollar a month hosting, I can almost
guarantee you right now that your site speed is going to be very poor.
Because many of these hosts, what they do is they have a area, called a server, which
they cram up with as many websites as they can possibly hold, and you are sharing server
resources with every other website on that server.
This is how they are able to sell web hosting for five dollars or ten dollars a month.
So like I said, get with a good hosting company.
I can give you a list of ones that I recommend, that I work with, that have good Time To First
Byte, that load quickly.
Most sites that are WordPress, you are going to want a host where it doesn't have a cPanel.
Where the email and all those functions are kept separate and the website is in one area,
and then your email is run through a separate thing, like GSuite, or Microsoft 365 that
handles the email for you.
But to the original question on Reddit, How Important is site speed to SEO?
It's less important than content on the page.
It's less important than the links coming in.
But you do need to be able to beat the other competitors in your space when it comes to
whatever field you are in.
If they have better Time to First Byte, and if the total pages have less code inefficiencies,
and if their pages are loading faster, then if all other things are equal, you're going
to rank below them.
I think most SEOs agree that if you can improve the site speed, that's good.
But it's not a substitute for not having the proper content on the page, or not building
up your link profile.
But it's something that you must have if you are in a competitive field.
If you only have two or three competitors, you might get by with having a slow site.
If you're in a very competitive field, then a fast site is something that you absolutely
must have.
Hope that answers that questions a bit better.
My name is John Locke.
My business is Lockedown Design and SEO.
We help manufacturing and industrial companies with SEO, so they get more requests for quotes.
If you have a SEO question you'd like to see us answer, drop it in the comments below,
and we'll answer it out in a future video for you.
Until next time, peace.