Many SEO managers have taken the impact of images on website ranking lightly. Whenever SEO is talked about, some of the first things that come to our mind are content, backlinks or keywords. This is not wrong and these factors do have great impact on SEO, but it isn’t all that is important as there are many other possibilities for SEO that impact site performence on search engines. Especially since there are plenty of factors that weigh in a page rank that are not purely backlink or content-driven. So it should not have come as too much of a surprise when Google announced that page load speed is a ranking factor for both desktop and mobile searches. Of course, one factor out of more than 200, but one that is still worth serious consideration.
1. Website Speed as a Ranking factor

Site speed, according to Google, “reflects how quickly a website responds to web requests” and for all intents and purposes serves both the user and the site owner. Users get an enhanced experience, site owners are more likely to get reduced operation costs and… well, more users, who stay on the website longer.

Google thinks the same, as indicated by the very fact that it provides us with tools to check our site speed and suggests solutions for sluggish pages. There is the PageSpeed module in the Google Developers section and a Page Speed Insights for making a speed audit for every website.

Yahoo also has a developer module for page speed improvements, called Yslow. The slew of freely available tools is certainly meant to wear off some of the concerns that only big sites can benefit from this change. In fact, chances are smaller sites have the upper hand here in terms of flexibility and adjusting. Some questions and concerns remain though, the most important being:

What is and how exactly does Google measure “site speed?”

For instance, the difference between “document complete” and “fully rendered” time when loading a page was mentioned. The former means that while not all the elements on a page are showing, you can start clicking and navigating. The latter means that everything is clearly visible on the page, even background stuff like ads and images. Even though it is difficult to pinpoint specifically and with certainty which aspect of speed directly helps your rankings, working on your site loading speed, in general, is bound, at the very least, to enhance your users’ experience. So, for instance, having a “document complete” time which is faster than the “fully rendered time” could help.

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