Everyone is talking about the new Google algorithm factor: Web site speed.
Some people are rushing to optimize graphics and even buy a faster server. This is absolutely hilarious to me. It’s really no big deal; or at least, it shouldn’t be. In fact, it will probably never effect your site SERPS – at all. Matt Cutts, one of the top SEO Gurus at Google, states on his blog that it is a minor factor one of over 200 factors that you should be considering.
“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.”… “Compared to those signals, site speed will carry much less weight.”
Your Web site should already be optimized for speed.
If you’re Web site isn’t responding very well before this Google news/update, then shame on you for not doing something about it any sooner! Remember, Google is not the authority to all things Web related, even though it may seem like it. In practical Web “best practice” terms, you should have already had your Web site optimized as best as possible. You should have already compressed your JPG graphics files and optimized your GIFs/PNGs. You should have already considered compressing your CSS an JavaScript files (I’m guilty here). If your Web site is not optimized then your visitors, regardless of how they are finding your site (direct, search engine or referral), are likely to “bounce” back from it. You want to give your visitors the best visiting experience possible. It’s been my opinion for some time now that you’ve got about 2-3 seconds to load a page “fully” for your visitor and another 2-3 seconds to allow them to scan your content; that’s it. If your site doesn’t load fast enough, they will click that back button. If you don’t show them a reason to stay and read your content, they will click that back button. So, what Google is doing is actual a good thing for it’s search engine results by removing or penalizing sites that have poor speed. In the end, it will save you time.
What about the speed on busy shared hosting servers?
The big question that comes to mind is, “Will this factor effect SERPS for Web sites that are hosted on busy shared servers?” This could become an issue for some sites. I’ve seen from some GoDaddy experiences (not limited) that some share hosting servers are hosting too many sites at once. During peak hours, the response from the server can stretch to 15-20 seconds to return the HTML/XHTML portion of the page. This speed issue is not limited to GoDaddy servers. It highly depends on the server hardware and process loads on the server.
How can I measure my site’s speed?
The way that I’ve tested site speed in the past is to use Mozilla’s Firefox Browser with the Firebug Plugin (Web Development Evolved). The Firebug plugin is a great tool for Web developers, but it also has network analysis tools. When loading a site’s page you can clearly see the time connecting to the server, time waiting for the server and the time sending/receiving data. It can give valuable insight into what is causing a Web page to load slowly.
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