Forums Forums White Hat SEO Using a Google map embed vs a image on your website

  • Using a Google map embed vs a image on your website

    Posted by seohelper on September 11, 2020 at 10:10 am

    Hello.

    I’ve built a website that has a Google map embedded on the page and when I check the website on Google speed test it seems the Google map seems to cause speed issues and is responsible for a bunch of the issues listed.

    I’m wondering if having a screen shot image of the map and using that instead of the map embed would be a better practice for my website? or is using the Google map embed better?

    BigBalli replied 3 years, 6 months ago 1 Member · 2 Replies
  • 2 Replies
  • steffanlv

    Guest
    September 11, 2020 at 10:18 am

    A Google Map is typically one of those ‘authority’ recommendations Google usually likes but yes I can see that it might be difficult for many site owners to include that bit of JS on their site and potentially see some slight speed issues.

    While this is not a particular test I have run myself (a focused, singular test of using an image vs Google Map embed) my recommendation for you to do is to use an image for the pages you are worried about and perhaps use the actual Map code on a page you are not so worried about, like the About page? That way the speed issues aren’t there on the pages you need to render as fast as possible but your site gets the potential ranking signal value from having the embed code on another page on your website. You get the best of both.

  • BigBalli

    Guest
    September 11, 2020 at 4:07 pm

    Some thoughts:

    * single image will always be faster, especially if hosted locally.
    * you can lazy load the map embed (load it after the page is ready)
    * you can load the image then if the user clicks on it replace it with an embed