Image Sizes and Load Time of Webpage

[gouri]

It is believed that the load time of a page may have an affect of where it stands in the Google SERP.

Suppose I have an image that is 50kb. But when I look at the file size of the entire page that the image is on it says 10kb. Does that mean that the web host has compressed the picture from 50kb to something smaller so that the entire page is only 10kb in file size?

If this is the case then I don't have to worry that the image is 50kb.

[rainborick]

File size may have an impact on the results in Image search, but I don't believe it has any effect in the main search results. The 10kb is the size of the HTML file itself, and doesn't include any of the images or other components displayed when the page is rendered by a browser.

You do want to keep the total download time in mind when you create your pages, but for the sake of users - not search engines. A substantial portion of the world still relies on dial-up access at 56Kbps or less. If your page takes more than 40-60 seconds to load on dial-up, many of those users will simply give up and go elsewhere.

[gouri]

Thanks for explaining what the 10kb stands for. I didn't know if that included the images.

Also, I didn't know how many people access the internet with a dialup connection. That is definitely good to know. I may have to reduce the load time of some of my pages.

[potentialgeek]

I've had some pages with many large image files and they have ranked well. Many users have high speed nowadays so there's no reason for Google to penalize heavy pages. Google is more into quality than load speed. Since I have good low-cost hosting on one site, I added more images. I wouldn't worry about it.

Some sites use Flash that loads a 1 Mb file or larger on the home page. Google isn't going to penalize it.

p/g

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 8:20 pm (utc) on Oct. 27, 2008]

[Robert Charlton]

It is believed that the load time of a page may have an affect of where it stands in the Google SERP.

I think the load time of a page affects how many pages you're likely to get indexed, not how well they're liable to rank.

Googlebot will only spend a limited time crawling a site. The amount of time is related to inbound linking factors and PageRank. Therefore, if you have a very large site, page size can affect crawl time and the number of pages indexed. The pages that aren't indexed aren't ranking. This is probably at the core of the belief you express.

Conceivably, though, if enough of the site is not indexed, you might some amount of nav link boost due to loss of PageRank circulation in your deep pages, but I'd only be guessing about this.

Additionally, if Google is monitoring user satisfaction and your pages never fully load (something I see happening on sites that pull from many different ad servers, eg) and visitors leave because of this, then this might also affect rankings. This is also conjecture.

But for most sites, I don't think that load times and rankings are related, at least not directly .

[pageoneresults]

Additionally, if Google is monitoring user satisfaction and your pages never fully load (something I see happening on sites that pull from many different ad servers, eg) and visitors leave because of this, then this might also affect rankings. This is also conjecture.

Hmmm, I think there is a bit more fact behind the above statement. I would guess that all that stuff you see in Google Analytics has a "direct" impact on your performance in the SERPs. And yes, there are other factors that can trump the "poor performance" issues. High PR, authority, etc.

I can tell you that when I land on a page and it is calling 10, 15, 20 images from a flickr image farm, I'm apt to hit my back button before that 5th 150k image begins to load. Those image farms have polluted the Internet and have made the browsing experience on many sites less than satisfactory. It's what I call website pollution as those large images eat bandwidth which in turn requires energy. ;)