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PageRank Down? How to Improve Site Load Speed

By 84 Comments

Wordpress-wp-super-cache-plugins
Click Image for More on WP Caching Plugins and Optimization

Another possible cause of dropping PageRank – and even worse – potential loss of organic search traffic – is slow load time.

Most WordPress blogs are not loading nearly as quickly as they can and there ARE some great tools out there to assist us in speeding them up.

GTmetrix offers a free WordPress Optimization Guide and free online Page Load speed test that provides comprehensive results.

  • NOTE: a page load time of 5.29s still garners an F grade so don’t panic when you run your site!
  • Test your home page and some of your posts to identify issues that affect one and not the other.

This screen capture shows most of the first page of results. There are multiple tabs and much more to see so do run your own URLs. It doesn’t cost you anything but your time.

GTmetrix Page Speed Results
GTmetrix Page Speed Results – Click to enlarge (Not all shown in image)

They recommend two very popular WordPress plugins: W3 Total Cache to set an expiration time and speed up browser caching and SmushIt to optimize images. (Many blogs are using images that are way too large and even I should optimize all the images here.)

WARNING: Be aware that caching plugins
are highly likely to conflict with other plugins
and WordPress or Theme upgrades or changes.

We need to identify bloggers who are particularly adept at optimizing caching plugins and make a list of those willing to assist and what they charge to help other bloggers. Any volunteers?

LOAD TIME TOOLS:

PAGE LOAD TIME TIPS:

PAGE SPEED TIPS:

  • Reduce the Number of Posts you display on your main page to speed up your blog! Go to WP admin under Settings and set how many posts will be displayed on the front page and going to 5 seems to be the best option, but this can vary from theme to theme as well, as some themes are much heavier than others causing slow speeds. Tip from JR whose Internet Marketing Blog is one to definitely be reading.
  • JR also tells us that another issue with page speed is plugins like Similar Posts that drag down speed by calling the related posts for each page on the blog and can really affect page load times.
  • Make sure your sharing buttons are ONLY on the post and NOT on your main page. They can really slow your blog down. Tip from Kristi Hines of the exceptional Social Media for Businesses Advice blog Kikolani.com. I make it a point to read what Kristi writes everywhere. Bloggers should seriously consider buying her inexpensive Blog Post Promotion Guide.
  • I use WP-Optimize to delete post revisions and optimize databases. It is easy to run and hasn’t caused any problems. When I had the caching issue each time I published a new post I found that optimizing just before publishing DID make a difference.
  • Ray from Dolphin Hosting recommends we keep an eye on is Google’s new page speed service and says another fairly decent test site that Google recommends is WebPageTest.org.

Do you have more resources, tips, or blog posts that belong here? Leave the links in the comments and I’ll move them up into the resources section of the post.

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Gail Gardner

Small Business Marketing Strategist at GrowMap
Gail Gardner is the founder of GrowMap.com. She is a Small Business Marketing Strategist who mentors small businesses, bloggers, and freelancers. After 23 years in the field with IBM and 5.5 years managing AdWords accounts, her focus shifted to small business marketing strategy. GrowMap.com is listed by Cision as a Top 100 Site for Marketers and has received three Small Business Influencer Awards from Small Business Trends. Named by D&B a Top 50 SMB Influencer on Twitter, you can follow Gail @GrowMap and on LinkedIn.
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Comments

  1. Thanks to provide a page rank checker tools and also improve site load speed cache plugin information its really helpfull for my blog

    Reply

  3. Hello, I have recently seen on a blog of mine a PR decrease by 1 point, and I think its because I restricted the internal links pointing out to the home page.

    Does it sound it makes sense?

    Page Load times over 5 secs can cause trouble for sure.

    Thanks!

    Reply

    • Hi Dolly,

      I’ve run into exactly the same issues and am not currently using any caching plugin. I need to research to find out IF we really do need one then we must know how to optimize the configuration.

      Caching plugins were causing my blog to not load when I publish a new post – possibly because so many bloggers tweet my new content right away.

      If anyone has insights into Caching best practices please do share. As always here, relevant links are encouraged. Comments with links are likely to go into moderation and I will find and approve them.
      growmap would love you to read ..Blog Post PromotionMy Profile

      Reply

  7. I haven’t given high importance to the page load cache but since there’s a lot of things that I didn’t know about Page Load, I found them here & thanks for sharing this page load tool. I’ll install & let you know the status of my website.

    Reply

  8. After reading this post I realized I have been missing on this till now! This could be the reason why I dont have enough traffic though I have great content and helpful blogs. I guess people lost their patience because of the speed. Thanks for sharing.

    Reply

  9. My site stats
    Page load time: 4.51s
    Total page size: 842KB
    Total number of requests: 98
    Page speed grade: B
    Yslow grade: D

    I will follow the guide to turn both grades to A.

    Reply

  11. This post sounds quite interesting. I would not miss upon my page loading speed from now on. Thanks for informing. I wish I had known this before.

    Reply

  12. Nice! This could be a very useful tool for me. I’ve been looking for ways on how to make my site run a little faster. Thanks for the tips as well.

    Reply

  13. Ok. I understood any factor that affects the traffic to my site. Thanks for informing. I would take care of this factor from now on. Till now I never paid attention to this!

    Reply

  15. I never thought of this before. Maybe this is the reason why my traffic reduced when my site loading speed decreased due to few internal errors.

    Reply

  16. Site load speed has a lot of affect on the traffic. I would surely not want to visit a site that takes time to load the pages. If I visit then I would cancel it and view another similar site that is faster and recommend the same to my friends.

    Reply

  17. Whoa! Seems a great list. This will take me some time to try them then -,-

    Since my site is still new, my page loading time is still fine but I’m really worrying when it gets bigger. I do posts images on my site and loads 8 posts per page so I guess that will really cause my site to load slow.
    Jess would love you to read ..4 Places To Go Out For Your First DateMy Profile

    Reply

  20. Page speed is really important, and will become even more important in the neat future.

    Also is there a huge effect on the baunce rate if your site loads to slowly, so even if Google didn´t uses Page Speed bynow, is the baunce rate used by G. for quite some time to determine your rankings!

    Thanks for sharing these tips.

    Reply

  21. Well, for ranking of site two most important things are considered. First, is the number of natural links and second is the load time of a site. I think to reduce load time we should also adopt any available resource.

    Reply

  23. Thanks for this great post. It really helped me a lot and I use a lot of those tools now. In addition, the guides were great I read them all especially How to Reduce Page Load Time by 75% was great. Because it helped me reduce 40% page load time so I’d recommend it to everyone.

    Reply

  24. I agree with the author and want to tell that this is one area I need to improve on my blogs. I think having to many plugins will cause slower speeds so I try to keep them to a minimal. Nice to learn something new and important here.

    Reply

  25. Got a B, so i guess it’s not that bad? I’ve never put too much thought on speed, since i believe a well made website already gives high performance without thinking too much about it. But i guess i could work on a it a little, even if just to test the results.
    Maria would love you to read ..Certified Nursing Assistant SalaryMy Profile

    Reply

  28. I am not sure that I can agree with you that a possible cause of dropping PageRank is slow load time.
    PageRank (PR) of a webpage is determined by calculating the total value of all the incoming links. The value of each link is calculated by dividing the PR of the linking page by the number of links on the page. We only see integer values but Google has all the decimal points. Every page is then ranked according to incoming link value. PR is allocated in a logarithmic fashion with a base probably in the region of 8-9.
    Slow load time will be picked up by search engines as an adverse factor that can reduce positioning on the SERPS, but the PageRank is not directly affected.
    Apologies for being pedantic, but PageRank and more importantly HomePage PageRank are too frequently misuderstood.

    Hope this helps

    Kind regards

    David

    Reply

    • Hi David,

      You could be correct, but since Google has indicated that they are using page load times they may or may not affect PageRank. It is wise to always verify what they say they are doing and I have not seen any research published on that specifically.

      I tied this post into the recent update because I was getting a lot of questions about why it goes down from bloggers. As we both know, search engine position is more important than PageRank (except when the advertiser considering you is looking at it) and page load time IS supposed to be a factor in search engine position – either now or eventually – it doesn’t hurt to have bloggers improving their load times.

      PageRank will go down if your blog receives a lot of comments and chooses to be dofollow and most likely also for duplicate content issues – some of them out of your control and for broken links or links to bad neighborhoods.
      growmap would love you to read ..PageRank Down? WP Plugin Checks for Broken LinksMy Profile

      Reply

  29. I did not give high importance to the page load cache but since there’s a lot of things that I didn’t know about Page Load, I found them here & thanks for sharing this page load tool. I would install & let you know the status of my website. Thanks a ton.

    Reply

  30. I think this helps more than the tool I was using, the little bug tool. Because it would tell me why my website was slow but it was terrible at helping me fix the issues or even understand the issues. I hope this will make the process easier for me!!! I love all of the website help you have posted lately!

    Reply

    • Have you used WebPageTest.org and looked at the reports it generates. It gives a lot of detail and it is free.

      Reply

  31. I have worked on my main website speed before and never noticed much of a jump in the rankings. Has anyone noticed the difference? I will continue to work on it since I feel all of the small pieces must add up! But just wondering if anyone has had any improvements in rankings with working on your site speed?

    Reply

    • Interesting question and I’m not sure anyone can give you definitive answer on this, but…

      Google is very clear that speed is one of the “signals” they monitor. They even approached me about participating in their new site acceleration hardware solution, also called PageSpeed. They are getting into speed in a big way. And for me that’s the best clue that speed is important.

      Reply

    • I don’t think you need to worry about speed, you’re on a blogspot.com site and you only have two posts.

      Reply

  33. Is Wp-Optimize a good tool to help me cope up with this time taking page loading trouble? Are there any similar tools I could choose from? Thanks for telling about the Google page speed service. I really need something like this. Thanks for sharing.

    Reply

  34. Loading speed of a website is very important factor on the web. It is the important criteria from Google to provide search result.

    Reply

  35. I never thought of this before! Thanks for telling it here. My web page takes little longer to load, and I must do something about it after getting aware it could be a possible cause to lower my page rank. I would try reducing the number of posts on my main page.

    Reply

  36. Nice tips. With Google saying that it factors page load time into how it ranks pages, we all should take it seriously. Google even makes a tool for you to use in their Webmaster Tools, so there really is no excuse. Page loading has become part of SEO.

    Reply

  38. I know that slow load time is something that google now takes into account (they have even a section dedicated to it in webmaster tools) but I though it would just effect the actual rankings, do you think it will have a bearing on pagerank too?
    James H would love you to read ..Envirophone voucher codeMy Profile

    Reply

  39. Thanks for this great post it really helped me a lot and I use a lot of those tools now. Also the guides were great I read them all especially How to Reduce Page Load Time by 75% was great. Because it helped me reduce 40% page load time so I’d recommend it to everyone.
    Peter would love you to read ..telefonisch vergaderenMy Profile

    Reply

  40. I have heard that since last Google Panda update Google has started valuing Page Load speed, and this speed can palay an important part in lowering or upering the Page rank

    Reply

  41. I haven’t given high importance to the page load cache but since there’s a lot of things that I didn’t know about Page Load, I found them here & thanks for sharing this page load tool. I’ll install & let you know the status of my website.

    Reply

  42. Thank you for all the tips! I’ve been updating my site – installing plug ins, smushing images, taking care of broken links, etc – for the past few hours since I read it! 🙂 I’ve passed on the link to my blogging group too because I know we could all use this great information!
    Dawn would love you to read ..6% Cash Back at JCPenneyMy Profile

    Reply

    • Hi Danny,

      Agreed – there is a definite trade-off and constant re-evaluation of which plugins speed your blog up and which cause problems. Caching plugins are particularly problematic and require caution when making changes or ungrading WordPress or any other plugin.

      The most common plugin conflicts are between caching plugins and other plugins we commonly use. I disabled Ajax edit comments here a long time ago because of that issue.
      growmap would love you to read ..PageRank Down? WP Plugin Checks for Broken LinksMy Profile

      Reply

  45. Great article, I think page speed really helps your SEO campaigns due to a number of outlining factors. Bookmarking this.

    Reply

    • I am trying out a service called CloudFlare with the W3 Total Cache plugin on one of my less important sites to see how well it works and so far have been very impressed. Loads a bit faster and the first byte time was cut in half. Just don’t like that I have to use their nameservers.
      Mike S. would love you to read ..Asthma BooksMy Profile

      Reply

  46. For ranking of site two most important things are considered.First is the number of natural links and second is the load time of a site. I think to reduce load time we should also adopt any available resource.

    Reply

  48. Ever since Google announced that they are including site load speed in their algo, I thought that I’m doomed because of the large images I put in my site. I got not choice but to work on it and find the best suited image size that will increase my site speed.

    Reply

  49. If you are running Chrome you can install the Google Page Speed tool for Chrome
    http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/03/page-speed-for-chrome-and-in-40.html

    If you load your site with it running you’ll get a bunch of suggestions for changes you can make to improve page load time.

    The other thing you can do is look at using a CDN. I’ve had some success with Cloudflare.
    https://www.cloudflare.com/
    Joe would love you to read ..Essential Questions Your Web Designer Should Be Asking YouMy Profile

    Reply

  50. One of the resources I find really helpful is webpagetest.org for measing component load time. Smushit is a great service and their is a WP plugin for it as well.

    W3 Cache is an exceptional plugin but it takes some tuning to get everything running well. But I also added Cloudflare as well and the combination of everything managed to reduce my time to first byte from about 2 seconds to 167ms and page load time from 9 seconds to 2 seconds.

    Speed is the one thing we can control, well at least it’s less mysterious than search engine algorithms.
    Get Out of Debt Guy would love you to read ..Is Bankruptcy After Divorce and Option? – MandyMy Profile

    Reply

      • The name servers work great and I’ve never had a problem with them. In fact I set all my entires to TTL 5 minutes. This way, whenever I make a change it propagates through fast.

        A Sunday evening is the best time to make the change since it will take about 12 hours to flow through most of the external name servers from your old entries.

        No worries. Go for it.
        Get Out of Debt Guy would love you to read ..Living From Paycheck to Paycheck. – AngeleneMy Profile

        Reply

  51. Hi,
    Thanks for the link to the free WordPress Optimization Guide. I am actively using WordPress to build my mini sites and this guide will surely allow me to learn some knowledge.

    Reply

  52. Slow load time is very important problem that most of online interpreter are facing. will surely activate all the things according to your suggestion for more fast loading speed. i need click and go speed.

    Reply

  54. Great post as always Gail, I want to suggest the plugin WP Minify as well to compress scripts and HTML loads.

    Smush It is great!

    And, actually WP Super Cache is a better and easier plugin to use and configure than W3 Total Cache, imho. I have a variety of different plugins and WP Super Cache has never conflicted with any of them.

    Another issue with page speed is plugins like Similar Posts, they drag down speed by calling the related posts for each page on the blog and can really affect page speed.

    Another issue with page speed is the amount of post excerpts you have on the home page. There is a huge difference in load time, and especially First Byte Time, which is the time it takes to load the first page of the site, between say 5 posts versus 7 or 8 or more. In WP admin under Settings – Reading you can set how many posts will be displayed on the front page and going to 5 seems to be the best option, but this can vary from theme to theme as well, as some themes are much heavier than others causing slow speeds.

    As far as optimizing images, it’s basically a matter of resizing them in an image editor, there’s a free one called GIMP that is great, but Smush It does a great job without being a heavy server load on the blog.
    JR would love you to read ..Niche & Keyword Research & Keyword Analysis Step-by-Step GuideMy Profile

    Reply

    • Hi JR,

      I am so happy to see you active again. Maybe our circles don’t overlap enough as I haven’t seen you in quite a while. Thank you for the additional tips. I’ll find a way to make them more visible in this post.

      Every blogger I know uses one of those two caching plugins, but which they prefer is different. I suspect it depends on how well you’ve learned to configure them. I need to find an expert to guest post about that.

      Your tip about how many posts on the home page I should have thought of but hadn’t. That would definitely be a simple fix that could make a big difference for many blogs.

      Something related is sharing buttons. Kristi Hines made sure I knew to put them on the posts NOT on the main page because calling that many in multiple times on your main page would really slow things to a crawl!

      I use GIMP to do screen captures and reduce images, but when I put an image in a post I don’t know exactly what size I’m going to want it to end up. I reduce it to make the caption fit and display well and to have the text wrap so my images are different sizes.

      Since you say SmushIt is a low overhead I should probably get it installed and find a good write-up on how to reduce images without breaking the links. Most of my links do NOT go to a larger image on this blog – they go to the source I credit that has related content to read.
      growmap would love you to read ..Bloggers Wanted for Joint VenturesMy Profile

      Reply

  55. I was always wonder if the page loading time is really that important. It is obvious that if the site is loading like 5 min than nobody will going to visit it even the googlebot 😛 but is there a big difference between the site that load the 5 sec and the one that loads 8 sec? Beside on site optimization sometimes the load time depends on type of hosting that we use. Is it wise to change our hosting provider if our site loading time is few sec longer then the site of our competition?

    Reply

  58. I get 85% pg speed (B) and 77% yslow grade (C) on my wordpress blog. On my main page I get 83% pg speed (B) and 83% yslow grade (B). I did use cloudflare for a while which does a little cdn, but not a full cdn like amazon and my percentages were 2-5% better.

    I have also done some optimizing images, css, js, gzip, and that kind of thing. I could do a little more, but I don’t know that going through much more work will gain me but a few percentage points now, unless I try something like amazon cdn.

    My wordpress blog does use the super cache plugin. I find the w3 total cache plugin a little complicated to configure. Some of it you need to really know if your host has different caching abilities or not. Otherwise setting them will not help.

    Another thing that can help speed up a web site is depending on whether your host runs apache dso module, cgi/suphp, or fast-cgi. Fast cgi is much faster at rendering a page when compared to cgi/suphp. Of course if your host likes to overload a server with too many other accounts it can slow things down considerably too.

    Keep an eye on is Google’s new page speed service:
    http://code.google.com/speed/pss/index.html

    And another fairly decent test site that Google recommends is:
    http://www.webpagetest.org/compare
    Ray would love you to read ..Your public profile appearance and detailsMy Profile

    Reply

  59. Well I got two C’s. I thought I built a pretty efficient template but it would seem the JS is pulling it down a bit. Something I noticed with joomla is that you have to have certain JS libraries load in the template even if you don’t use them on the frontend of the site, if not the backend won’t work. Searching for a work around now!

    Reply

  60. My home page tested at 78% (C), which is bad news since I haven’t added everything to it yet and there are very few graphic. I don’t even have my header/logo yet and no banners. The results show images as 100% though.

    I have W3 Total Cache installed but haven’t activated it yet. I’ll check the others to and do like you said and test individual pages. I appreciate the tip and resources.
    Brian D. Hawkins would love you to read ..A Call To Established Bloggers – Lets Partner TogetherMy Profile

    Reply

    • Hi Brian,

      Be careful installing caching plugins as they have the highest probability of conflicting with other plugins. I encourage bloggers to assist each other technically when they run into conflicts and other issues.

      They grading scale of that tool is very strong and I haven’t seen any blogs that tested above a B for any part of it yet. I suspect most are going to see an F at least when they first start testing and will have to work from there.

      In a way that is good news because you’ll be able to tell clearly that you’re making improvements and how much further you have to go. I suspect almost every blogger I know is up against this challenge. If any have optimized completely I hope they’ll drop in and share their tips and any posts they may have used or written.
      growmap would love you to read ..PageRank Down? WP Plugin Checks for Broken LinksMy Profile

      Reply

      • I sure do appreciate you Gail. I activated W3 Total Cache, after backing everything up. I didn’t go with the CloudFlare option but still might. My new score:
        Page Speed Grade 87% (B)
        YSlow Grade 80% (B)

        I also installed SmushIt and crunched a few images but there was not difference in file site. I optimize images pretty good before I use them.

        Reply

        • That’s great news, Brian. I had one caching plugin that Sammy preferred and then another blogger I worked with switched to a different one that started causing issues whenever I published a new post. Now I need to figure out which one is which and get the original one reinstalled.

          I’d love to hear more about how you optimize images. I make sure mine are pretty small but then I often end up reducing their physical size (although not sure about the actual size).

          I need to find some good posts about SmushIt and/or optimizing existing images without breaking links or get someone to write a guest post for me to publish here. How to optimize images is one of the skills every blogger needs.
          growmap would love you to read ..Happy Birthday GrowMap 3 Years Old TodayMy Profile

          Reply

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