It's official: Page load speed is a factor in Google rankings

[djbaxter]

Google incorporating site speed in search rankings
by Matt Cutts
April 9, 2010

Google is incorporating site speed as one of the over 200 signals that we use in determining search rankings...

The main thing I want to get across is: don?t panic. We mentioned site speed as early as last year, and you can watch this video from February where I pointed out that we still put much more weight on factors like relevance, topicality, reputation, value-add, etc. ? all the factors that you probably think about all the time. Compared to those signals, site speed will carry much less weight.

In fact, if you read the official blog post, you?ll notice that the current implementation mentions that fewer than 1% of search queries will change as a result of incorporating site speed into our ranking. That means that even fewer search results are affected, since the average search query is returning 10 or so search results on each page. So please don?t worry that the effect of this change will be huge. In fact, I believe the official blog post mentioned that ?We launched this change a few weeks back after rigorous testing.? The fact that not too many people noticed the change is another reason not to stress out disproportionately over this change.

Read more on how to check and how to improve your site speed...

 

[A Niche SEO]

Google Algo Change How Much Will Speed Matter

Google has been discussing since at least June of 2009 that the loading speed of your website matter. Now, they have included it in their algorithm.

Go here to read more: Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Using site speed in web search ranking.

 

[WarnerO]

We've been afraid of this as if your customer deals with shopping, no chance to be successful without images and images need more time to load than plain texts.

 

[djbaxter]

We've been afraid of this as if your customer deals with shopping, no chance to be successful without images and images need more time to load than plain texts.

Use a program like Photoshop to optimize your images.

 

[A Niche SEO]

This is definitely going to be a problem for the non coding website owner. They are just not going to wanting to mess around with CSS and java scripts.

On another point minstrel:

Just curious since I started this thread why I was bumped to the second position for this this conversation?

 

[djbaxter]

This is definitely going to be a problem for the non coding website owner. They are just not going to wanting to mess around with CSS and java scripts.

Check your loading speeds in your Google Webmaster Central account. If it's not too bad, don't stress over it. If it's very slow, you're going to either need to learn how to speed it up or hire someone to do that for you.

On another point minstrel:

Just curious since I started this thread why I was bumped to the second position for this this conversation?

Because there was a pre-existing thread on this topic when you started a new thread. I merged the two, which automatically placed your post according to date and time of post.

 

[johnsamuels]

If you are using wordpress, plugins like totalcache and supercache can have quite a dramatic effect on site load time.

 

[djbaxter]

Good point, johnsamuels. Do a search at WordPress.org for other optimizing suggestions, or search for "optimizing WordPress". Other software will have similar guides.

 

[A Niche SEO]

It will definitely be very interesting to see how this all eventually plays out. I for one am very happy to see this emphasis on speed.