I am new to this forum and somewhat new to SEO, which brings me to my question. How important is the loading time of a website when looking at SEO? I am working on a website for a client that currently has flash everything and loads very slowly.
Thank you!
Google have released Page Speed Tool which shows the factors affecting on your page load time. Follow that points to minimize the load time.
Google has recently added load time to its criteria for determining rankings in the search results.
if site is that slow users might tend to leave the your site…better improve it
You should consider replacing any Flash with Javascript.
When HTML5 is more widely adopted, use the “video” tags for your animations. Not working with Internet Exploder just yet, but IE 10.0 is supposed to be supporting it. (?)
Regards,
Woody House
Online Graphics USA and Canada
Far more important than “SEO” a slow loading site/page will just put your visitors off. People have short attention spans so unless they can see something in a couple of seconds it’s as good as putting “fail” against the site.
If you have a very good reason to use Flash for the whole content then at least offer people a HTML version so they can get what they want without waiting too long.
I appreciate the responses. The only Flash they truly want to keep is in the navigation, but I moved that to an external script to help speed a little as well. The other Flash elements I am replacing with Javascript soon!
As felgall mentioned, site speed has become a much more important factor over the past couple of months. Google knows that people aren’t going to sit around and wait too long for a page to load. After all, internet searchers are an impatient bunch; they want information, and they want it now!
If the site you’re working on is too slow, it can definitely have a negative impact on your SEO (and your conversions, because you never know who’s going to hit the ‘back’ button before the page even loads!) Anything you can do to speed it up is a good thing.