02

Dec

Google Says a Slow Site Could Hurt Your Search Rankings. Test Your Page Speed.

Posted by: Jeremy Reither

The time it takes for your website to load used to be considered just a usability issue…a nuisance that perhaps your visitors didn’t like, but that search engines didn’t pay particular attention to. That slow loading site might have been a pain to use, but page speed wouldn’t have directly affected search engine rankings. Today, however, in Google’s attempt to deliver “better” search results (not just “relevant” search results) to its users, the new version of their search engine will be placing more value on the speed of the websites being ranked. If you’re concerned about search engine rankings, you should be concerned about your website speed, too.

If your if your website loads more quickly than your competitors’, you may soon have a leg up in the search engine optimization race. Speed is the new factor in search engine optimization (SEO) that Google’s own Matt Cutts stated in an interview is being paid more attention as Google constantly refines the algorithm it uses to determine which websites to display at the top of its search results. Major changes to Google’s search engine architecture are in the works, as part of the project called Google Caffeine, and Google has said pretty plainly that among the changes they’re implementing is a new emphasis on website speed.

So, how do you test your website’s speed?

You may need to engage a web developer to fix any page speed issues your website has, but the first step in fixing the issues is identifying them – these tools will help.

• WebPageTest.org is a free service that will not only test the load time of your site, but also tell you what parts of a page took the longest to load.
• Page Speed is a plug-in for the Firefox web browser (note that Page Speed also requires the Firebug plug-in).
• Google has also published a bunch of other tools to help web developers test and improve page load time of websites

So does this mean your slow site is going to be relegated to the bottom of the search results? Probably not. But will a slow site be bumped from its #1 spot to #5 – or vice versa? That’s very possible.

As they say, SEO is a game of inches, so it makes sense to consider anything Google says impacts search rankings. Now you can add page speed to that list of considerations.