Do site load times have an impact on Google rankings?

Key Takeaways

it's time for another round of grab bag questions we record all these questions on one day and then we send them out over the course of many different days so last time everybody complained that they were seeing the same red Polo shirt for like 30 or 40 days in a row so I actually brought a bunch of different shirts and uh we'll just sprinkle it up and mix it up a little bit so uh you get a little more variety in your shirts so let's start with the first question from Dees in New York uh Dees asks what impact do site times have on Google rankings the short answer is none right now now let's give a little more color um of course if a site takes so long to load that we can't even fetch it Google bot can't get a copy of it then that will have an effect on your rankings because your site is essentially timing out so if your site is taking 20 or 30 seconds to respond to requests that could be a problem but if your site takes 1 second versus 2 seconds that has no difference whatsoever on on Google's rankings so that's the short answer now let's give a little more color um if you haven't heard Larry uh Larry pagee has talked about how he wants the web to be he wants the web to be really fast almost as fast as a magazine like as soon as you can turn the page you're ready for the next page and so Chrome was built with that philosophy you know we want to make the web really fast make it a really good experience So currently site load times have no effect on Google's rankings you know what might happen in the future I don't know I could certainly imagine uh Google saying well we'd like the web to be faster what can we do to encourage people to make their sites faster and how can we try to get the word out that if your site is faster people will be happier and they're more likely to come back to your site or to use your site more often we've seen that on our own site so um it is interesting that we want the web to be fast and we want sites to load quickly right now it's not at all a factor in our rankings for the future who knows what might uh be involved um personally I think it's a great idea if you can look at some of the ways to make your site a little faster so for example don't include 40 different JavaScript files you can compact those all down into one JavaScript or one CSS file you know don't include huge images when your image size is only set to something tiny there's a lot of ways that you can Minify or compact your pages to make them return faster for users you can gzip Pages for example so there's a lot of ways you can look at that's really good for user experience don't worry about it from a search engine ranking perspective right now but it probably can make a really big difference for your users