WordPress: Site Speed Versus Feature Benefits

By Chris Frerecks • April 12th, 2010

WordPress: Site Speed Versus Feature Benefits

On Friday Google announced they were going to include a new signal in their search ranking algorithm – “site speed”. For the layperson, site speed is often refered to it as “load time” and it is a part of what affects a WordPress blog’s or, for that matter, any site’s competitive SEO. your site speed reflects how quickly a page responds to visitor requests from a web browser. Not to worry too much, Matt Cutts of Google discloses that “site speed” is only one of 200 signals used to compare you to the competition for organic search results and it’s not nearly as important as the relevance of your pages -see the below video. Google also adds, less than 1% of all search queries are even affected by the speed of sites… so again worry some, but not too much. 
 
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=muSIzHurn4U]
 
While they’re saying site speed is a new signal, there are some general things you should know. First off, there are a scary number of random things that can affect how your WordPress blog loads in any one person’s browser, including their own computer settings. Second, pages have probably always had to load favorably in order to justify more spider crawling, more key phrase indexing and better SEO. Spiders don’t always crawl deep into your pages! And finally, it’s why a service like ours puts so much effort into things like WordPress updates, plugin evaluation, server setup and caching as a part of our standard monthly service. Here is a quick list of things that may affect a blogs’ “site speed” depending on your site’s setup and also on who’s visiting:
 
1. The version of the visitors’ browser – is it current or so old and obsolete that it’s having an effect on the speed they see?
2. Does site have too many plugins or widgets added – we certainly do our best to monitor this for clients, but folks want lots of plugins & widgets and a bad one or bad combination can have an effect.
3. Are there specific modifications to a site’s design or to a feature that all of a sudden slows site speed down?
4. Is the site making reference to too many outside resources, like for instance, various 3rd party or Social Media tools?
5. Is a theme or design choice creating too much drag – does it count on too many style sheets or is there a poor use of graphics?
6. Something that can be in your favor, but also deceiving in the long run is “how far along is the competition?” – are they even competing yet?
7. And then there’s security software. If tuned too agressively on a visitor’s PC, it can also undermine visitor experience.

Ultimately, we’re constantly looking for ways to balance features and speeding things up to provide a better visitor experience for all clients. No matter how you manage a WordPress blog nothing ever stands still: WordPress software, open source feature plugins, widgets, search algorithm signals, security solutions and web browsers are forever being updated and that affects everyone – not just you, but the competition too. We’d be the first to admit we’ve made some mistakes managing it all over the years, but that experience is a benefit in the long run. The focus of a service like ours is to fight the never ending battle so clients are always advancing cost effectively and in ways that support a competitive advantage!

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