Whether its the latest ranking factor of your website being mobile friendly or the old classic “keyword optimised” content I think most website owners are aware of the fact that there are more than one or two factors that can impact your ranking in search engines such as Google.
One of the increasingly common, yet largely unknown reasons websites are not ranking as well as they could is due to poor website speeds. Google’s take on search ranking is, in my humble and simplified opinion, pretty simple. Make it relevant, answer a question and ensure the experience is rich.
It’s the “ensure the experience is rich” aspect of the journey that we are talking about when it comes to the speed of your website and yes Google does take into consideration the speed of your site when it comes to factoring how your site ranks as it has a pretty significant impact on a users experience. How many times have you cursed a site for taking ages to load or simply gone to another result out of frustration.
There are a number of reasons sites can perform poorly resulting in less than desirable user experiences can be as simple as finding a better web hosting company to as complex as looking at the code of your website and ensuring it is not the cause of poor website page loading times.
One test any business owner can do is to visit http://gtmetrix.com/ and type in their website address to run a free report which can then be used to discuss with a developer to see whether there are any changes that could be made to improve the results.