Google Ranks your Website using Site Speed

Google has announced that site speed will be a determining factor in how they rank your website in serps (search engine results page).

At the moment according to Google the change will affect less than 1% of search query results.  This may not sound much, but with 1.3 billion websites competing on Google worldwide, 1% is 13.5 million and it is plausible to think it will affect you.

This is a clear signal from Google that site owners need to pay attention to site speed. If a site takes too long to load, most will abandon it and move on. Google recognises this and, as a search engine provider, knows it must address this in order to maintain and attract users.

So if it’s not something that’s on your agenda when building your next site or reviewing your current one, then you really need to consider it.

Start by checking what your current site speed is, there are various tools you can use – as suggested by Google in their blog.

Here are some free tools that you can use to evaluate the speed of your site:

• Page Speed, an open source Firefox/Firebug add-on that evaluates the performance of web pages and gives suggestions for improvement.
• YSlow, a free tool from Yahoo! that suggests ways to improve website speed.
• WebPagetest shows a waterfall view of your pages’ load performance plus an optimization checklist.
• In Webmaster Tools, Labs > Site Performance shows the speed of your website as experienced by users around the world as in the chart below. We’ve also blogged about site performance.
• Find more tools on code.google.com/speed.

If you need help, your web developer can tell you what to do and show you what improvements you can make.

Tags: site speed
Posted in Google | No Comments »
Author: Equilibrium
Time: April 14th, 2010