Is loading speed really so important to Google?

[superclown2]

I've been playing with Bootstrap lately and it's possible to create some really awesome sites with it whilst still keeping them fully responsive but at the cost of a loading speed hit with all the css and javascript files that have to be loaded first. So which is the more important in Google's eyes? Speed or attractiveness?

[aristotle]

How slow are we talking about?

I don't think it becomes a problem for Google until it reaches more than a few seconds. In other words it doesn't have to be superfast.

You also need to think about human visitors. Most people appreciate a fast site and some will lose patience with a very slow site and abandon it.

[iammeiamfree]

This depends on the internet connection of the user. If on a slow connection then all those extra bytes are going to slow things down alot whilst it might seem fast enough on a high speed connection.

[phranque]

the effective site speed is going to depend partly on who is serving the bootstrap files and what cache related headers are sent with them.

[edited by: phranque at 11:27 pm (utc) on Oct 4, 2014]

[netmeg]

Personally, I'm always going to side with speed.

[seoskunk]

its one of 200 signals I guess but its important to the user. Amazon claim sales through speed and its a vital factor.

[tangor]

If the user has trouble that's where it counts. G, of course, is not a user.... but they claim to be checking sites out FOR users.

[JD_Toims]

So which is the more important in Google's eyes? Speed or attractiveness?

FYQ [Fixed Your Question]:
So which is more important to users? Speed or attractiveness?

Answer: It really depends on the user base and how "necessary" your site is to them -- If a site is "necessary" then, IMO, attractiveness is a winner, but if your site is "one of a million" then I'd go with speed.

[edited by: JD_Toims at 4:36 am (utc) on Oct 5, 2014]

[not2easy]

If I had to pick one or the other I'd try for "both" but JD_Toims makes a good point in terms of importance to users if it's one or the other. It appears to me that site speed is quite important to Google or they wouldn't be offering tools and pointing to resources to push it so hard. Where they used to just have the Webmaster Guidelines, now they have a suite of site speed analysis, optimization and development tutorials: [developers.google.com...]

[GreyBeard123]

There is (almost) nothing that frustrates me more than when pages take ‘forever’ to load.

Amazon claim sales through speed and its a vital factor.

I agree 100%, especially if the user’s internet connection is slow...
We recently optimized an ecommerce site (with more than 3000 products) to increase the speed.

It was, and is, an ugly site, but orders trebled overnight…

[tbear]

It really depends on the user base and how "necessary" your site is to them

I get totally frustrated by sites, that I really want to get information from, taking a long time to load, normally because of 'extra stuff and advertising', or, even more frustrating 'art', slowing things down.
The feeling I get is that my 'need' is being taken advantage of, which in turn doesn't endear me to the site, even if I need the info it has.

I've always put speed first.

[tbear]

I've always put speed first.

That is to say, user experience before Google....

[Rasputin]

Speed is important, but more for users than google I think - I have never seen any correlation between making sites faster and improved serps results.

But bootstrap is pretty small and can be made smaller through their 'optimise' option, and even jquery etc can be loaded from a cdn and isn't too big.

Generally speaking I think slow sites either are hosted with a poor hosting company, or have too many / unoptimised images, or load dozens of css files and scripts, but not because they use bootstrap/jquery - certainly our own optimised bootstrap/ jquery sites load pretty quickly.

So IMO the benefits in terms of user experience are well worth the filesize.

[jay5r]

The Bootstrap stuff only has to get pulled once then it's cached. So after the first page, there's really no issue. And if you use their CDN option then it may have been loaded and cached on a site the user hit previously.

Personally, I wouldn't worry about it too much.

[EditorialGuy]

So which is the more important in Google's eyes? Speed or attractiveness?

"Attractiveness" is subjective. Speed, on the other hand, can be measured.

Still, that doesn't mean speed matters more than attractiveness, if attractiveness has an impact on user metrics that Google does measure.

Remember, too, that attractiveness and speed can go hand in hand. For example, an attractive page with a clean, minimalist layout may load faster than an ugly page with lots of ads, widgets, and other visual clutter.

[superclown2]

Speed, on the other hand, can be measured.

Sure. Google's Pagespeed tools, though, can give a 100% score to a site that's quite heavy with graphics, provided that it is well optimised. This suggests that they might, just might, be more interested in efficiency than pure speed. As they say themselves "a picture can be worth a thousand words".

[Dymero]

I'd definitely go with speed first. If a page won't load quickly enough, a user will be out of there before they even have a chance to care about how your site looks.

Then focus on functionality. If the user can't navigate well enough, kiss them goodbye. Then finally focus on attractiveness to give something extra for people to talk about.

I will admit that I am always wowed by a good looking site at first, but if it takes forever to load or if I can't navigate, then I'm out of there. So although I stand by speed as the top thing, I'd definitely pull down some effort on all three. Though having a speedy site is good, don't focus on it at the expense of never having a functional or decently well designed site.