The AdWords system re-evaluates landing pages on a regular basis. If you make significant improvements to your landing page's load time, therefore, you should eventually see an improved Quality Score and lower first page bids. Note that your Quality Score may update incrementally over a number of weeks after you improve your load time.
| Factors contributing to a slow load time |
Below are common causes of a slow load time. If you don't directly upkeep your site, you might want to pass this information along to your webmaster.
Multi-second meta refreshes
Redirects that use multi-second meta refreshes are a common culprit. If you have a redirect set to occur after several seconds, change it to zero seconds so that the redirect happens immediately.
Slow redirects
To check the speed of your redirects, copy and paste your destination URL into a web browser to see how long the browser spends on each redirect URL. You can get more precise values using a tool like Fiddler (English only).
Multiple redirects
Each redirect increases your landing page load time. If you have more than one redirect, consider eliminating unnecessary ones.
Interstitial pages
If you employ an interstitial page (where the user waits for a few seconds before being taken to the landing page), you should consider removing it.
Slow server
Your site may be hosted by a slow server. Use Google's Webmaster Tools to see how long your site takes to fetch. If it's slow, contact your web hosting provider.
Large page size
If your page's HTML document is very large, try compressing it with gzip or DEFLATE.
| Google's Webmaster Tools |
You can use Google's Webmaster Tools (not available in all languages) to graph the average download time for your site. Note, however, that Webmaster Tools doesn't take into account redirects or interstitial pages, which can affect your load time grade.
To use Google's Webmaster Tools:
- Sign in to Webmaster Tools with your Google Account login at http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/.
- Click your site's URL if you see it on the page. If not, click the Add Site button, enter your URL, then follow the instructions to verify your site before returning to these directions.
- Click Diagnostics in the menu to expand it, then click Crawl stats to see the crawl details.
- The third graph will show your site's average load time.
| Other resources |
Here are some other resources to help improve your load time (English only):
- Use a tool like Page Speed to learn why your site may be loading slowly.
- See a list of best practices for improving your load time.
