Google and page load speed – what’s it all about?

If you keep up to date with the goings on in the SEO world you will have read about Google’s recent announcement regarding their inclusion of page load times in to their search ranking factors.  With a lot of companies jumping on the bandwagon to use this to sell their services I wanted to address what this means to your website and what you can do to make improvements.

The full announcement from Google can be found here is well worth a readhttp://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/04/using-site-speed-in-web-search-ranking.html. In summary the key points to take home are:

• Site speed reflects how quickly a website responds to web requests
• While site speed is a new signal, it doesn’t carry as much weight as the relevance of a page
• Currently, fewer than 1% of search queries are affected by the site speed signal in our implementation and the signal for site speed only applies for visitors searching in English on Google.com at this point

To see how your site is performing and to get a list of recommended changes I would start with looking at “Site Performance” within the Labs section of your Google Webmaster Tools.  As you can see one of my own websites is incredibly slow (thanks to multiple JS and CSS files plus a few resource heavy WordPress plug-ins) and needs dome serious attention!

To check out your site on the fly (and anybody else’s you fancy keeping an eye on) you can also install Google’s page speed plug-in for FireFox here http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/download.html. This site within Firebug (also required) and gives a page a score out of 100 along with what you need to improve.

I would like to add a word of caution not to get too carried away with the importance of load times though. Sure it’s a factor and yes it will reduce visitor bounce rates but if you have great content, provide value and your site is well optimised for a keyword, you are still going to rank high even if your site doesn’t load as fast as others. If your site doesn’t have any quality content, strong incoming links etc, don’t bet on quick load times alone putting you to the top of the results.