Site Availability and Speed in SEO

Chapter 8 of SEO Best Practice: Technical Optimisation

Site availability and speed can affect a website’s ability to rank. This chapter looks at how to reduce the impact of site down time, as well as the steps SEOs can take to increase the loading speed of webpages.

By Econsultancy

16 minute read

A website’s speed and availability can affect SEO performance in a number of ways. As page speed is currently a ranking factor, it is essential for SEOs to understand what can affect it. This chapter covers:

Availability errors: If a site generates significant errors due to unavailability over a sustained period, it will be removed from the search engine’s results. How can SEOs monitor their site availability and avoid errors during planned maintenance?
Core Web Vitals: Google uses a set of metrics, referred to as Core Web Vitals, to measure page performance. What metrics fall under this catch-all term and how can SEOs optimise for them?
Site speed: Google may choose to reduce the rankings of pages that are particularly slow to load, or remove them from ranking completely. What steps can SEOs take to ensure site speed is being monitored?