Google Landing Page Quality Score Will Soon Have A New Factor – Tips To Make It A Non-Issue

In the post “Landing page load time will soon be incorporated into Quality Score” at the Inside AdWords blog they discuss Langing Page load time and how it will soon affect the Quality Score of your landing pages. Landing page load time is simply defined as “the amount of time it takes for a user to see the landing page after clicking an ad”.

I’ll discuss a couple of things that affect the speed at which your page loads. First, the server that your web site is sitting on makes a big difference. Often, people frown upon a shared hosting environment, but I’ll tell you, I have never ran into problems with GoDaddy in that regard. They provide affordable dedicated hosting and virtual dedicated hosting options as well. Another thing, I’ve been running a script to monitor server downtime and I haven’t heard a peep from it since I started monitoring my sites hosted on GoDaddy.

Another important factor is the design of your web page. It has always been my way of thinking in the 10 or so years that I have been building web sites that you should always build for the lowest common denominator. People are still on dial up. If your landing page loads quickly for them, you are in business.

Site Development Tools

I have yet to find a great site development tool (or generator) that produces code that I’m happy with. I admit, I have stopped actively searching since I realized what FrontPage was doing to my web sites. Most tools that I have used create huge bloated files and fill your pages with unnecessary junk when they same result can be accomplished with way less code. A lot of time HTML tables are used for positioning of elements when CSS can be used with, again, way less code, and a light-weight file as a result. If anyone knows of any great development tools that generate light-weight files using CSS and no footprints and extra crap please let me know in the comments. (I hope I just didn’t open myself up for SiteRubix spammers! That program (last I checked) does not produce CSS code and the file sizes are often much larger than they need to be.)

There are also tools (or techniques), often free, that will accomplish what’s called HTTP Compression. These tools can significantly reduce the landing page load time by compressing your web site files. You can find more on that here.