RICARDONUÑEZ.

When I started working in web design and development, I didn’t care much about website speed. I only took the look and functionality into consideration because that is what calls people’s attention  and that is what clients want.

Although that was what the majority of people thought, the website speed has always been really important in web development. Not only does nobody like to wait, but also in the most recent times  Google considers that when ranking your website in the search results.

How much the speed  in the 200+ Google SEO factors counts is a mystery, but my take is that it is relevant for what you have to offer in your website… content.

I think Google always took speed into consideration, but right now, after the launch of their super fast instant search, it is getting even more important. They finally launched the mobile instant search this week. And other evidence that Google is taking speed seriously is a post which I read last week about how they are working in speeding up Google Chrome.

Website speed has more benefits

A fast website can help you improve sales, get more readers and  provide an overall better navigation experience to your website visitors,  whether they are shoppers, readers, clients or trolls (yes, we should care about trolls too, after all they are still living creatures).

What can you do about it?

There are many things that you can do to speed up the website: You can reduce images, limit the number of plugins, limit the number of external media files, improve your coding, change to a better host etc.

In my opinion, there is one factor that is underrated when it comes to improving website speed and that is content.

(I know content is king, it is all what people want blah blah blah. But I’m not talking about that kind of importance of content, I’m talking about speed).

Content can help your website when it comes to speed

Hear me out. Content is used to get attention and helps to get the other factors working for you. For example, great content will generate backlinks that will help your page ranking and will get you a better spot in the Google results. But in my opinion it will also help you to diminish the speed as a SEO factor.

No matter what  the website speed is, Google will take great content over a speedy website, that is how you can benefit of content when it comes to speed.

That looks like really obvious, but what about if you are competing with a website that has both?

People should take all the factors in consideration, and if you have great content it is only a matter of time for you to get to the top spot.

I had this discussion with a client this week that is why I decided to write this post. I think a lot of people need to pay attention to this factors.

A little balance will benefit you and  isn’t that just what we want in our life?

Photo by xxxtoff

2 Responses

  1. To me, speed used to be more important, because everything was so slow. I remember playing my commodore 64, and it took me 30 minutes to start a game, and 10 seconds after I started playing it, the screen showed an error and I had to start all over again. The same with modems, ah the noise to get connected to the Internet 🙂

    Now, everything is fast, and that’s why we also need to be fast. 10 years ago, we could wait forever for almost everything, today 10 seconds is forever. I have actually never thought about speed and content in the way that you describe. You’re absolutely right.

    What I have thought a lot about lately when it comes to content, is that I never seem to read blog posts that are more than 1,000 words. That’s about speed. I like to read fast, and finish fast. At least when it comes to blog posts. Not sure if people agree with me, but if people write long blog posts, it needs to be very attractive in order to get me as a reader 🙂

    1. I agree with you. It has to be a very good blog for me to read a long post. I try to keep the post nder 600 words.
      There’s especial occasions, like tutorials or some kind of reports, but other than that, long posts are boring and people just skip most of the parts.
      You can see it in the stats, you rarely see visitors over five minutes.

      by the way, I still have nightmares with the modem sound or the hard drive of my old computer trying to boot.

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