Google has announced that site speed is now officially being factored into search engine rankings. What does that mean for your real estate site or blog? Here are a few things we’ve seen on several sites, mostly those with older designs, that could now impact your rankings in a negative way:
- Playing a sound file on your site as it loads. Believe it not, Jen sent me a link to a site just this week that plays a song when the page loads. Slows down your page load time, and more than just a little annoying, especially if you weren’t expecting any sound to play automatically. If your pages uses video from your own server, this could affect load times as well.
- Flash files that automatically play on page load, especially if it’s on an older version of Flash and hasn’t been updated in a while. This could cause an otherwise fast loading site to absolutely creep.
- Using large image files and reducing the size for display. The images you are using for your pages should really be built for the size you want to display. All too often, people will use a large image and, instead of editing it and resizing it, they simply reduce the display size in their pages. These larger images take longer to download for a browser than they would if they were resized at design time.
Just a few things you can quickly check to make sure site load time will not negatively impact your SEO! There’s more information on this change over at Search Engine Land.
