Can a slow website cause a drop in SERPS?

[cutemohamed]

Hey Guys,


I used to get around 50-70 UVs/day to my autoblog.
However, after being throttled by my webhost for a while, I am now getting a max of 10 UVs/day.

Is this due to the throttling/slow server or something else? And will I recover?

Your help is highly appreciated.

Thank you in advance.

 

[dr.pepper]

Nothing more annoying than a slow to load page. If its slow to load i usually just think the sites down and move on to the next result

 

[Hostwinds]

Google has repeatedly stressed the importance of page speed in their SERP's

 

[davids355]

YeA speed definitely makes a difference to google SERPS.

 

[SOCOM]

Speed will also decrease bounce rate.

 

[Nookie Monster]

While page speed may be a factor in your UV's dropping, quality content and visability of your site is the most likely cause.

Do you regularly update your content?
Have you made any QUALITY backlinks lately?

Unfortunately you can do a "Set it and forget it" model in today's climate. You need to spend some time WORKING you site to keep it active.

That said PM me your site and I'll run a small blast for you if you wish.

 

[JackSparrow]

Ive heard that slow websites can cause a slight dip on your rankings (pure theory, needs more research!).

But like as been said this is a very tiny fraction of what you should be concentrating on to get your search engine rankings higher.

Both offpage and onpage is equally important in today's SEO game!

 

[davids355]

^^ yes page speed is a small factor, but it does make a difference.

Just to expand on my previous post, some time back before I was doing any serious link building, I made a move to optimise my site for speed --
I analysed all page elements, cut down object requests by half, optimised images, combined stylesheets and compressed JS. I also move to a much faster server.

In the coming weeks it made a clear and subsea vial difference to my SERPS and my traffic so I'm sure it does have a effect.

Also another incentive is that it will increase conversion and user experience, so as an onsite factor, it's well worth taking into consideration.

 

[cutemohamed]

I havent updated the content nor changed anything. Also, I am not targeting any specific keywords since its an autoblog. So can the page load speed make such a difference?

 

[sitecontact]

Yes load speed can cause drop in SERPs... G team officially announced that last year. Faster load increases user experience and this is what engines are after - better user experience

 

[digital_penguin]

As said above, there needs to be more data to be 100% sure. But a) Google has announced that they take site-speed into account numerous times, and b) I have seen a heavy influence myself.

Some time ago I upgraded one of my servers from apache to nginx, which lead to significant increases in speed (yes I know, apache can be optimised too, nginx is just so much less work for the same result). All sites hosted on that server had significant increases in ranking afterwards. Without any changes in content publishing rhythm or other factors.

I think this is one potential problem with autoblogs. If you pull media with your posts, you entirely depend on the sources to manage image-sizes etc. reasonably. If some of them start to post megabyte sized thumbnails, you slow down, probably wondering what happened.

BTW, why did your hoster throttle you with such low visitor numbers (50-70 per day is nothing in comparison)? How many other sites/autoblogs are you running on that account?

 

[cutemohamed]

As said above, there needs to be more data to be 100% sure. But a) Google has announced that they take site-speed into account numerous times, and b) I have seen a heavy influence myself.

Some time ago I upgraded one of my servers from apache to nginx, which lead to significant increases in speed (yes I know, apache can be optimised too, nginx is just so much less work for the same result). All sites hosted on that server had significant increases in ranking afterwards. Without any changes in content publishing rhythm or other factors.

I think this is one potential problem with autoblogs. If you pull media with your posts, you entirely depend on the sources to manage image-sizes etc. reasonably. If some of them start to post megabyte sized thumbnails, you slow down, probably wondering what happened.

BTW, why did your hoster throttle you with such low visitor numbers (50-70 per day is nothing in comparison)? How many other sites/autoblogs are you running on that account?

I run another 4 websites but they're still under construction (only 1 of them gets 30 UVs/day). I dont know why, and was unable to solve the problem with them so I switched hosts to see if the problem will be solved.

Does anyone know if My rankings will recover when I am no more throttled?

 

[digital_penguin]

I run another 4 websites but they're still under construction (only 1 of them gets 30 UVs/day). I dont know why, and was unable to solve the problem with them so I switched hosts to see if the problem will be solved.

Does anyone know if My rankings will recover when I am no more throttled?

Yes, if speed is the cause they should. Like mine got better because of speed enhancement. Happened pretty fast too.

BTW, depending on how slow your site is, you can also loose quite a lot of visitors due to people leaving before the page is loaded. Ist amazing how many people drop out after a few seconds. Dont think this was mentioned yet? Of course in this case speeding-up helps instantly.

 

[mrdexter]

Ive heard that slow websites can cause a slight dip on your rankings (pure theory, needs more research!).

NO further research needed here. I've optimised a few sites now which I didn't build but have come to me as clients afterwards, and with no other work being carried out I have seen an increase, sometimes of one position, sometimes of three (first page positions, other lower keywords may have increased more).

However, Google don't measure page speed by the time it takes to load, that would be rather silly as we would all build really short pages. What they do is rank a site and page by a number of factors to give a score, which I suppose then becomes ones of the many ranking factors they use to decide position.

OP, as Jack and several others have pointed out, I don't think your server host throttling your speed is the cause, unless it massively increased bouncerate as suggested by everything red.

 

[fluke88]

Absolutely.

Using website speed analysis / tests you can anaysis your site & even compare your website speed with the sites of your competitors

 

[w-nada]

It is 100% true, there are wordpress plugins that increase your website loading speed.

 

[Mihaita]

Test your website and solv the errors

pagespeed.googlelabs.com

 

[cutemohamed]

Test your website and solv the errors

pagespeed.googlelabs.com

Thank you, that was quite useful!

 

[Normdogg]

hostwinds is a class act... I had my database guy tell me yesterday, "I can't believe how fast this host is".

Get your page load speeds up. It makes all the difference in the world.

 

[InternetMayhem]

Yes it can, and this is why a lot of web developers don't use PGN for images or a lot of Java for example because that causes web sites to load slow.