Google Ranking pages individually for speed, or domain as a whole?

Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi

Message Too Old, No Replies

Google Ranking pages individually for speed, or domain as a whole?

tolkin

5:06 am on Jul 30, 2017 (gmt 0)

Hey there,

Just had this question for a while now. I have a marketplace that due to the users being able to add a description to their items (images, videos, content in general) those item pages have been getting quite heavy. I have optimized categories and search pages to load amazingly fast but the item pages are unbelievable heavy (some of them).

Do you think Google ranks a site as a whole for the speed or on a page by page scenario? For example, let's say I have a page about broccoli and a page about carrots. The broccoli page is tremendously fast and the carrots is being amazingly slow.

Does the carrot affect the broccoli? :P

Kind Regards

aristotle

7:26 pm on Jul 30, 2017 (gmt 0)

You seem to be saying that the "domain as a whole" is fast. Does this mean that just a few pages are slow, but most are fast? And are asking if the few slow pages will be helped by the fast ones. Or are there a lot of slow pages?

mack

9:56 pm on Jul 30, 2017 (gmt 0)

The key here is that Google does not rank sites at all. It's all at page level. If your sellers are just adding text to the page, then this should not really effect page load times significantly. Text is rather light compared to other page elements. There are things you can attempt to do to speed up page load times, but content does have a value, so it's justified in being there.

Mack.

tolkin

12:55 am on Jul 31, 2017 (gmt 0)

The issue is that they do not just add text, they are adding images and I am talking about dozens of them that explain the item or they are for marketing etc.

Since Speed is a ranking factor I wanted to know if for example, we have a site that is 80% optimized for speed and each page loads under a second but there is 20% of pages that load within 5-6 seconds, does that affect the overall ranking of the domain or it just affects the rankings of each individual page.

Thanks

lucy24

2:43 am on Jul 31, 2017 (gmt 0)

Google itself may not tar the whole site with the same brush, but sooner or later your human users will. "Oh, ###, this is that place that took half a minute to load one page. I'm not going to bother."

Would it be possible to apply some kind of filtering to your users' uploads? That applies especially to reducing the filesize of images, which are almost certainly ten times as big* as they need to be. Videos should not be a problem, because--ahem! cough-cough!--they will of course not play until the user asks them to play, so they don't figure in initial page-load time.

* As we speak, I am converting all my old pictures from the '80s and '90s from film to digital. The scanner creates jpgs weighing in at 1.5-2.5 MB, around 4500x3000px, which I will then resize appropriately before attempting to do anything with them. But your average user has no idea that there is an alternative to uploading the entire monster.

tolkin

5:07 am on Jul 31, 2017 (gmt 0)

Hey there Lucy24,

thanks for the reply. I kinda thought of the same thing and we are working on changing that by pre processing the images when uploaded and serve them through a DNS but till this work is done I would love to get something more like an official statement or an experiment, a case study etc.

Thanks !

Robert Charlton

7:08 am on Jul 31, 2017 (gmt 0)

...I would love to get something more like an official statement or an experiment, a case study etc.

tolkin, not clear how customized you want rock solid opinion to be, but lucy24 is right on about this. I've observed image size issues in a large proportion of sites I've seen with problems. It's one of the most common problems I see in mom and pop sites, eg. It's also a huge issue in marketing and personal emails.

Another problem you'll get in marketplace type sites is users breaking Google linking guidelines, keyword stuffing, etc. Particularly true if you have users competing against each other for similar items.

keyplyr

8:21 am on Jul 31, 2017 (gmt 0)

You can use ImageMagick [imagemagick.org] to reduce file size in the upload process. It's free.

not2easy

9:46 am on Jul 31, 2017 (gmt 0)

Another service is ImageOptim that lowers filesize by stripping out metadata. It has been free to use as an api, but I believe they now have a service charge: [imageoptim.com...]

mack

11:17 pm on Aug 5, 2017 (gmt 0)

Another thing that may work is using a script such as a lightroom application to show the images as a slide show. By doing this only one image will be loaded, and if the user wishes to see more they have to actively click a link to request the next image. It would improve page performance, and also prevent certain users experiencing image overload. Some people just want the bare bones content without the images.

Mack.