Website speed now a factor in google rankings

The loading speed of your website is now more important than ever with Google announcing a new signal in their search ranking algorithms: site speed.

“Speeding up websites is important — not just to site owners, but to all Internet users. Faster sites create happy users and we’ve seen in our internal studies that when a site responds slowly, visitors spend less time there. But faster sites don’t just improve user experience; recent data shows that improving site speed also reduces operating costs. 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.” - google.com

So how long does your website take to load?

There are a number of free tools available to help you evalulate the speed of your website. Some are more developer based and possibly be beyond the interest & understanding of the average website owner. You can find some listed in the article link below.

There are many factors that can effect the speed of your website; including:

• The size of your images, photos, graphics – this is particularly relevant for online store owners who upload excessively large photos for the products on their site. We had one client recently upload a photo directly from a digital camera at a huge 4mb. A good secret to keeping your online store performing effectively is to resize your images to a reasonable size before you upload.
• Background sounds – we had a client a while ago with quite a large audio file coded into their website to play as a background sound. As soon as we removed that the loading time improved by at least 50% plus got rid of a major annoyance factor on the site.
• RSS Feeds – if you’re displaying an RSS feed on your site be wary of the time it takes to load and the positioning of it in your site. If it’s positioned incorrectly it can cause a delay in other parts of your page loading whilst its loading the information from an external source.
  
• Your website is old – like most things there are better ways & means of building a site then what there was 5 years ago. If the software running on your website is out of date, then upgrading it can significantly improve the performance of your website.

Contact us to discuss upgrading or improving the speed of your website.

Read the Google’s announcement on Site Speed at:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/04/using-site-speed-in-web-search-ranking.html