Zoompf analyzes over 100,000 URLs to discover any correlation between website performance and search ranking position.

1. How Website Speed Actually Impacts
Search Ranking
Mark Isham
CEO, Zoompf

2. Google Webmaster Blog
April 9, 2010

3. Announcements from SMX Advanced
June 11, 2013

5. • Document Complete?
• Visually Complete?
• Time to Render Start?
• Time to First Byte?
• Google Analytics?
• What’s “good enough”?

6. 2000 Random :
• HDTV
• Durable power of
attorney
• Sporting goods stores
• …
X
Top 50 Results for Each:
• http://atg.sd.gov/Seniors/EstatePlanning
/PowerofAttorney.aspx
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_of
_attorney
• http://www.nolo.com/legalencyclopedia/durable-power-ofattorney-health-finances-29579.html
• …
=

7. 100,000 Test Pages
Search Term
Rank
URL
HDTV
1
url1
HDTV
2
url2
…
50
…
Sporting Goods Stores
1
Sporting Goods Stores
2
…
50
http://zoompf.com/search-ranking-factors

8. url1
url1
5.1
…
url2
url2
3.2
…
…
…
2.5
…
30 “Private” WebpageTest Instances on EC2

9. Metrics Captured
•
•
•
•
•
Document Complete Time
Fully Loaded Time
Time to First Byte
Time to Fully Rendered
Bytes Downloaded
•
•
•
•
•
Requests Made
Total Image Size
Gzip Savings
Minify Amount
More…

15. What Does this Mean?
• TTFB is easiest to measure
• Top performers invest in infrastructure
• Data is correlative only!
– Relevancy remains king
Our Recommendation:
TTFB of 500 ms or less!

16. What About the Long Tail?
(Searches with 4 or more keywords)

17. What is Time to First Byte?
TTFB = Latency + Server Response Time

18. Measuring Latency
1. Use PING
2. Goal: 100 ms or less

19. Latency: Use a CDN
Akamai, Cloudfront, CloudFlare, …

20. Server Response Time
TTFB = Latency + Server Response Time
So…
Server Response Time = TTFB - LATENCY
Tips
• Use WebPageTest for TTFB
• Use PING for Latency

21. Goal
Get Under Here!
TTFB = Latency + Server Response Time
(TTFB) 500 ms = (Ping) 100 ms + (Server Time) 400 ms

22. Optimizing Server Components
•
•
•
•
•
Big Topic, out of scope
Fast Webservers
Responsive Databases
Optimized code
Use caching!
– (Expires or cache-control: max-age)

23. Other Interesting Data
(Average across all 100k results)
Metric
Value
Document Complete
8.5 s
Fully Rendered
12.0 s
Time to First Byte
874 ms
Page Size
1.42 MB
Server Requests
104
Total Image Size
492 kb

24. References
• Moz Study: http://moz.com/blog/how-website-speedactually-impacts-search-ranking
• Time to First Byte: http://moz.com/blog/improvingsearch-rank-by-optimizing-your-time-to-first-byte
• Study Data: http://zoompf.com/search-ranking-factors
• Zoompf Free Tool: http://zoompf.com/free

25. CONTACT INFO:
Mark Isham
mark@zoompf.com
Twitter: @Zoompf
plus.google.com/+Zoompf
http://zoompf.com