Thursday, April 15, 2010
Google Uses Website Load Speed
Google has after a lot of warning introduced site speed as a part of its algorithm which means that it will take into account how slow the site loads when deciding which websites to list in its search results. They give 2 reasons for this, (i) User experience as they have found that users tend to leave slow loading websites more quickly, and (ii) Resource usage as slower loading websites use more server resources.
This introduction of a new algorithm has not been fully implemented yet and only applies to searches in Google.com which are performed in English, however I am pretty sure it will be rolled out across the whole system soon. In the Google Webmaster blog they say;
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.
For some time in Google Webmaster tools there has been an option under Labs to look at Site Performance. Here you will see a chart displaying over time the average time it takes for your website to load over the last few months. Unfortunately these results include countries with incredibly low speed internet connections so if for example your website is only aimed at customers in the UK you may still find you have a low load speed if a lot of people in the USA, where some internet connections are very slow, are accessing your website. In addition they also take into account the load speed of logins to admin as found on Wordpress or other Content Management System (CMS) websites. I do not consider this fair as these are not relevant to user experience and we should have the option to exclude these pages.
Anyway what do we do about improving load speed?
1. If your server supports gzip then gzip all your files,
2. Optimise any images so that they are as light as possible, an excellent online tool for this can be found at Image Resizer.
3. Do not have separate CSS style sheets, combine them all into one,
4. Combine all javascript used into one file.
5. With html code and css remove unnecessary spaces, comments etc if gzip is not enabled on your server.
Related Posts:
Google Uses Website Load Speed
Website Speed and Admin Pages
