Trends Google loves fast sites, but most hotels are lagging way behind.

Google cares about how quickly your website renders. It’s as simple as that. Load times are consistently rated a top SEO factor by experts and something Google has built a suite of tools around to help us measure and improve. But how are hotels doing? Are they keeping up with Google’s demands for speed? Here’s what we found.

The Goods
To find our answer we analyzed 4,800 hotel websites using Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool which gives each website a score of 0-100. If flagged hotels were hosted on identical pages within a single website, we only counted one instance of each. Keep in mind these scores are a composite of both how fast a site is loading now and how fast it could load with further optimization. A score of at least 85 is what Google considers “performing well.”

The average score for the hotels we analyzed was 68.7 with 13.0% of all sites sitting at or above a score of 85. Looking closer, 4.0-5.0 star hotels saw an average score of 64.5 (6.0% scored 85+), 3.0-3.5 star hotels averaged 68.2 (11.1% scored 85+), and 2.0-2.5 star hotels average a score of 69.9 (16.3% scored 85+).

What This Means
Perhaps most interestingly is how few 4.0-5.0 star properties were considered “performing well.” Likely a result of increased complexity with newer websites, it may be worth considering a more simplified approach with the next redesign.

Despite being imperfect, these scores are an interesting insight into how Google views hotel websites relative to the factors they consider in their ranking algorithm. We may not always agree with their rules, but to claim our share of the reach they provide, we do have to play by them.

Click here to check your site’s score.

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