HI Google Webmaster tool is showing pages on my site are taking 8.5 seconds to load. Does this affect Pagerank. my site is currently hosted on godaddy shared hosting and it is getting lot of impressions but very few clicks. the ratio for impressions to clicks is 20:1 Just wondering if this is fine or if if i should move to a vps hosting to improve speed and consequently pagerank. Also would like to know hostgator shared hosting is better than godaddy interms of page load time..
Yes, Google consider page speed, as Google don't want its user to go visit time taking websites. So you need to improve page speed by using google page speed online tool. It will give you all recommendations as well as it will show you optimized version of images. "the ratio for impressions to clicks is 20:1" Your CTR is 5%, that is good, changing server will not increase pagespeed much (It may depend what it downtime of your current hosting server), But using pagespeed tool you can certainly improve your website speed.
I'm not trying to hijack the thread, but can the pagespeed tool be trusted? I've noticed that the tool reports 3-5 seconds to load my own web pages. However, when viewing the page from various locations with various connectivity, the page actually loads in less than half a second. Even on a dialup connection, the load time averages 1.2 seconds. Yes, I have taken caching in account for the load times, and even disabled caching for my testing. Are we being penalized for faulty readings from the pagespeed tool?
i use Hostgator shared web hosting and every time when i look into the webmaster tools, my websites load time is less than 4 sec. I never see downtime of the hostgator server till now.
Do people seriously consider 4 seconds good? I start to fret when one of my sites takes over 1s to load and I far prefer them to be under 500ms. If I hit a slow loading site I tend to just close it before it finishes loading and move on.
thanks for the inputs. i checked that its problem with loading of images and the way PHP is loading. As i am using a prebuilt script on my website.. its difficult to make any changes now... so my questions is would moving my website to a VPS or dedicated hosting with high configuration improve page load time.
Google does take into consideration the response time of sites and includes it somewhere in its algorithm, I remember reading about it from a Google post where one of the developers said it (I'll take a look and edit the link in if I can find it again).