Back in March, I mentioned that landing page load times will factor in to Google’s quality scoring for Adwords advertisers at some stage this year. That time has nearly arrived.

According to this article on Internet Retailer, landing pages taking an additional 3 seconds to load above the average for a region will be penalized from June; which means higher pricing for advertisers. Another scenario that will cause a penalty is where a user is redirected to another page before arriving on the real landing page - such as cases where interstitial pages are used for tracking purposes.

I think this is a good move by Google that will actually benefit advertisers as faster landing page load times tend to result in better conversions. Nobody likes to sit around waiting for content to load. It’s really not all that difficult or time consuming to optimize page load times and you’d be surprised just how much you can shave off by a few tweaks.

For example, it’s not uncommon for imagery on landing pages to be unoptimized; particularly when the designer is thinking more about impact than economy. Most graphics packages offer compression features that can reduce file size substantially without causing an apparent loss of quality to the casual observer. I recently optimized an image file for a reader that was originally 120kb and was able to reduce it to 30kb with just a few seconds work.

Another common issue is code bloat - by using CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), you can easily shave a few kilobytes off a page’s size; particularly lengthy landing pages where there’s a great deal of text formatting changes.

Learn more:

Optimizing page load times
Creating effective landing pages
Beginners guide to CSS
Introduction to PPC