Mountain View, California — Search titan Google is very passionate about speed! Now websites with slow-loading pages face the prospect of lower search rankings. On Friday, the search leader officially declared that website speed, “how quickly a site responds to web requests” – is now considered to be a major criteria for determining the relevance of a Web page on its world-dominating search results.
Website owners and bloggers now need to take heed — However, Google says that not too much weight is given to site speed as a page’s relevance and notes that less than 1% of search queries are smitten by the change, but it still encourages website owners to consider implementing site speed booster to make their websites rank higher on Google search. Sites that fail to optimize for fast loading now face a greater likelihood of ranking lower on Google search results pages.
We hope this development has not caught anyone by surprise; Google has been talking about it in a blog post since December. The search engine giant seemed to indicate that such a change was in the cards, and the company formally announced the change on Friday with another post to its Webmaster Central blog. Also, in a new official blog post, Amit Singhal and Matt Cutts pointed out that site speed is perhaps something everyone should have been paying attention to all along. And here is another part of info: according to Singhal and Cutts, this change was actually implemented “a few weeks back”.
“Speeding up Web sites is very significant — not just to site owners, but to all Internet users,” explained Google Fellow Singhal and Cutts wrote in a blog post. “You may have discovered that here at Google we are obsessed with speed, in our products and on the web,” wrote Singhal and Cutts, the man webmasters look to as the Delphic Oracle of search results.
“Faster sites create satisfied users and we have witnessed in our internal experiment that when a site responds slowly, visitors spend less time there. But faster sites do not 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 is why we have decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings.” “As part of that effort, today we are including a new signal in our search ranking algorithms,” explained the duo in the blog post.
There are a dozens of complimentary tools available to Webmasters, in order to determine site speed of a websites it ranks. To evaluate the speed of your site, you can use the following tools, as suggested by the Google Webmaster Central Blog:
- 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.
Most probably, Google will evaluate site speed — at least in part — via Google Toolbar, the browser add-on installed on user machines across the globe. And one concerned webmaster wonders whether the company will consider that audiences vary from site to site. “Has Google took into account the connection speeds and origins of visitors as well. A website with lots of Indian users for instance will likely have slower speeds reported than a website with Japanese or Swedish users. Are those factors included in the calculation?”
For the moment, the site speed signal only applies to search in English on Google.com.