What follows is a series (if I complete them) of SEO reviews of some suspected ranking factors. Doing it for my own needs, maybe others will find interesting. It won’t be very scientific and I will not share all the details, just the overview.
Today I am looking at Page speed. I entered a popular weight loss term and put the results into WebPageTest to see what the page load speed is. Included are load time and start render. I suspect that start render is the most important factor, but who knows? Results from the first search – domain names only provided. (web design comment: going to put the data into an HTML table, so will use a tool, probably Quackit.com’s, as WordPress does not do this easily!
| Domain | Load Time (s) | Start Render (s) | Speed Index |
| wikihow.com | 3.100 | 0.458 | 1395 |
| cosmopolitan.com | 10.623 | 2.552 | 6568 |
| webmd.com | 5.941 | 1.330 | 3571 |
| indiatimes.com | 8.100 | 0.842 | 2726 |
| ask.com | 3.771 | 0.701 | 1383 |
| webmd.boots.com | 2.112 | 1.006 | 1694 |
| motleyhealth.com | 4.513 | 1.100 | 1855 |
| womenshealthmag.com | 5.596 | 1.774 | 4155 |
| forbes.com | 2.218 | 1.539 | 2131 |
| mensfitness.com | 3.100 | 0.458 | 1395 |
Verdict on Page Speed and SEO
Some of the slowest pages are top. This suggests that page speed really is not all that important. Most likely a real factor, but not going to help a site in its own right.
I took a quick look at the pages. There is no indication that page content makes a great deal of difference either. Many of the sites split the content over several pages – maybe Google can now determine this? Several have full page adverts which appear before you can see the content.
For now, the main factors appear to be related to good old fashioned PageRank – links to the domain etc.
