Yes, what we’ve been awaiting for some time and what people used to talk last year, finally happened – Google officially announced speed as a ranking factor in Google’s organic search. Read the full text here
ONE OF THE RANKING FACTORS. Please think about this. Speed is not the main factor. Let’s have a look what Google has to said today: “Like us, our users place a lot of value in speed — that’s why we’ve decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings. We use a variety of sources to determine the speed of a site relative to other sites.”
and
“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.”
and
“We encourage you to start looking at your site’s speed (the tools above provide a great starting point) — not only to improve your ranking in search engines, but also to improve everyone’s experience on the Internet.”
You may also consider these:
- There are large number of complaints about the fact that Google’s own Analytics script is a known load-time decelerator, and about the almost glacially slow rendering times of AdSense code.
- Sweb sites speed is still just a single one of over two-hundred signals Google uses to assess a site’s rankings. And let’s also remember that Google is first and foremost about delivering relevant results, just as it always has been.
- Matt Cutts himself said: “People shouldn’t stress out too much about Site-Speed, and the reason is that we’re always going to care first and foremost about quality. How good is a page for users?” Addressing Site-Speed’s function in assessing SERPs, he also said: “Don’t think it’s going to be the largest of the two-hundred factors.”
Free tools to evaluate how well your site performs on web speed wise:
- 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.
