We've been running some tests recently to understand what affects Google ranking today. Page speed is one of the things we have found to have a direct impact on where your site ranks. You can actually check the speed of any page on any website using Google's own PageSpeed Insights tool. Keep in mind that not even Google has a perfect score when it comes to page speed, nor do top-ranking sites like Amazon and Facebook. If your site isn't in the green when it comes to page speed, it doesn't mean that your website is dysfunctional--it just means there's room for improvement! It's possible that improving page speed can improve your ranking by at least one or two positions, which can be a big deal when that position moves you from page 2 to page 1. Our test client saw a ranking improvement just a few days after we made some updates to the home page that allowed it to load faster. By removing a mortgage calculator and an interactive Google map from the home page, we were able to significantly improve how fast the home page loaded. Now, a mortgage calculator and an interactive map are two very common and useful things to have on a home builder website--this doesn't mean you can't use them. Just don't use items like this on pages you want to rank, like the home page and inventory pages. When you run PageSpeed Insights, you'll see some suggestions for improving the HTML and CSS. A lot of this can actually be accomplished by using Google's own Angular Javascript on the site. Angular is basically a way to consolidate lengthy HTML and CSS scripts. It also allows your entire website to download all at once and be stored in a cache instead of being downloaded page by page. This makes the entire browsing experience much faster for the user. If you're interested in learning more about improving site speed or would like us to run an audit on your site, contact our support team at support@builderdesigns.com.