Slow Page Load Times Turn Off Consumers and Search Engines

Fast websites are crucial to keep the consumer's interest in your products and services, and to contribute to better search rankings. Quite often when a website is slow, owners are quick to blame the web hosting company.

There are many things to consider when a website is performing slowly, and often the web host is not at fault. Any script or widget installed on your website will have a negative impact on page load times. This includes third party analytics, online advertising, or anything that calls information from a third party website.

Often, the more information that is loaded from external websites, the slower your own website will load (not including a content distribution network or CDN). Search engines do take page load times into account for search rankings, although it only accounts for about 1% of ranking criteria according to Matt Cutts from Google.

Still, every little bit helps, and the side benefit is a more user friendly experience on your website.