Google announced on Friday that they have officially incorporated site speed into their algorithm as a factor in rankings, see their blog post about it at Google Rankings and Site Speed, Matt Cutts elaborates more on this issue here.
All in all, site speed should always be our concern since slow loading pages drive visitors away, but now that it is definitely going to affect rankings we really need to check and monitor our site speed to be sure that they are at their optimal speed. While Google does confirm that site speed is not as important as the relevance of a page or other factors for rankings and that all in all they surmise that less than 1% of rankings will be affected by this you still ought to check your sites to make sure that they are loading quickly, again mainly for the traffic that comes through.
It's a fact that website speed can have a big impact on conversions and overall site ROI, all other factors being equal simply because you keep visitors longer on your site. Most Internet users are instant gratification junkies, they want to zip through pages, and not wait around while your site is trying to load. And statistics show that visitors tend to stay on a site longer when it loads quickly and overall provides them with optimal performance.
Tools To Check Website Speed
- Page Speed - I have talked about this one before, and it's a very effective Firefox/Firebug add-on that evaluates the speed of web pages and provides suggestions for improvement.
- YSlow - This is a free Yahoo tool that offers suggestions to improve speed, also uses a Firefox add on.
If you don't use Firefox and other tools
- Use your Google Webmaster Tools account - Go to Labs then Site Performance and see a graph of your site's speed performance.
- AOL Page Test - Free tool to measure and analyze website performance.
- BrowserMob - Alerts and monitoring of website pages.
- IntroSpectrum - Online tool that actually simulates your traffic's experiences on your sites via their web browsers.
- Microsoft VRTA - This one provides visualizations of web site loading and provides suggestions for improvements.
- MySpace Performance Tracker - This tool is for Internet Explorer browsers and displays possible issues and problems that will affect load times and performance.
- WebPagetest - This one is pretty neat and offers a waterfall of your page load time and performance along with a comparison against an optimization checklist.
More In Depth Tools for Site Speed and General Site Performance
- Pylot - Free and runs HTTP load tests, verifies server responses, and generates reports with metrics.
- Wbox - Performs a variety of tests, including, site speed, server and web application stress testing. Also verifies the proper configuration of domains configuration, HTTP compression, and redirects.
- mon.itor.us - This tool offers a personalized and customized Ajax dashboard that checks server performance and availability, tracks all traffic, generates up time reports, checks CPU, memory as well as various other systems resources, and offers alerts whenever problems are detected.
Improved Page Speed for WordPress Blogs
If you are like me and other bloggers and those of us that use WordPress to build money sites or any kind of small niche sites then please check out WP Super Cache plugin. Often times blogs get over loaded with all those cool plugins, badges, and social bookmark and Twitter submission buttons we love to use and they can really affect WordPress blog speed and load times. WP Super Cache works great to improve the speed of blogs no matter how many frills you have.
That is really awesome because I just starting using the WP Super Cache plugin a few weeks ago too!
Thanks for the tip
Follow Me on Twitter @: webcreationUK
(6 comments)
So now it is not only for people not to like a slow-loading website, but for search engines also…Quite interesting, thanks for sharing this info.
Follow Me on Twitter @: DennisEdell
(35 comments)
You got to it before me! Looks like my post will be shorter and include a back-link..this is better then mine woulda been.
.-= Dennis Edell | Direct Sales Marketing´s last blog ..DEDC Remains DoFollow – BUT… =-.
@ Dennis
LOL, thanks
Follow Me on Twitter @: xpirtdesign
(1 comments)
Google has been talking about doing this for a while now. I guess it’s finally happening.
.-= SEO´s last blog ..Orange County SEO =-.
Follow Me on Twitter @: xpirtdesign
(6 comments)
The Page Speed plug in for Firebug works great. It tells you where you need to make improvements to speed up the page loading.
.-= Web Design´s last blog ..Orange County Web Design Offers =-.
Follow Me on Twitter @: netaccountant
(3 comments)
Just a heads up, for the 2 firefox plugins (Google Page Speed and YSlow) you need Firebug (another FFox plugin).
My favorite tools of the lot are Yslow and WebPageTest.org, but to be honest, Google’s Webmaster Tools is really what’s important because you get the speed “from the horse’s mouth” so to speak.
.-= Tom@NetAccountant´s last blog ..It’s official: your website speed is now a ranking factor in Google’s algorithm =-.
@ Tom
Web Page Test is a good one, I tried it out last night and it worked great!
Do you use the Google Webmasters tool to determine how good your page load is? I can’t for the life of me get my blog down into the green area (1 second or less)
but I’m using a caching plugin and CDN now and minimal plugins.
I wonder how strict they are on sites over that 1 second mark or if perhaps they have some other number they calculate based on?
.-= Chris Guthrie´s last blog ..Vibrant Media Review – In Text Advertising Case Study Part 2 =-.
@ Chris
My understanding is that anything under 25 seconds is okay, cannot find the reference where I read that, but it was a good source.
Also in the Google post announcing this latest algo change for site speed they say: We launched this change a few weeks back after rigorous testing. If you haven’t seen much change to your site rankings, then this site speed change possibly did not impact your site.
Now this blog shows 22% average load speed in webmaster tools and my rankings are just fine. But, I too would like to make mine faster, it’s more difficult with blogs though, my static sites are all showing 4 seconds or less average speed time.
Really good to know! Thanks for the heads up. Checking and improving my site speed is now a top priority.
Although they have formally included speed with their ranking factor, the search engine giant assured that it doesn’t carry as much weight as the relevance of a page. The company says that less than one percent of search queries have been affected by the change.
Follow Me on Twitter @: sonlinebiz
(3 comments)
I totally agree with you. I prefer using Site Lab as YSlow and PageSpeed keep givin me a score of 64% despite all my optimizations. With Google, I know my load time lies between 6 and 12 secs for now.
.-= Udegbunam Chukwudi´s last blog ..Optimize CSS & Speed Up Blogger Blog Load Time! =-.
Follow Me on Twitter @: danielsharkov
(8 comments)
My site is loading quite slow so I’m a bit concerned of the changes Google made. I don’t think that this is a good decision on their site, because there are many sites with tons of quality content that are loading quite slow. It wouldn’t be good if that change affects their rankings.
Pylot is a great tool. I have used it several times and it gives accurate information that can be of a good use.
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Follow Me on Twitter @: DennisEdell
(35 comments)
I wouldn’t worry tooooo heavily on it, they did say it was less then 1% of the algorithm, at least for now.
Dennis Edell | Direct Sales Marketing recently posted..Would You Like a PRIVATE Community
Web site speed has definitely become more of a factor. Thank you for these tools for us to check…we all need them!
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Follow Me on Twitter @: spectraelite
(11 comments)
I think YSlow Plugin is my number one Firefox Plugin. I always use it to check my Joomla Websites. It is really easy because it displays pretty much everything that I need to know in order to increase the Performance from all my Joomla Sites. You can check your JS, CSS, HTML, and Image Files together with the Speed and HTTP request.
YSlow is a must tool to have for any web designer out there.
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Hi,
I have made a list of some of the best website speed optimisation tools here: http://www.colinmcdermott.co.uk/website-speed-optimisation/tools/
May be useful.
Cheers
Follow Me on Twitter @: Boomajoom
(23 comments)
I wrote a post a while ago on optimization tips here: http://www.boomajoom.com/blog/free-website-optimization-tips-page-speed
Google Analytics now also has speed checking tools.
Website speed whether its for the purpose of ranking high or not is a must. Its annoying to wait forever for a page to load. Even if such sites provide important information its less likely that users will visit the site again.
The first factor that Google count for ranking of site is the number of natural back links and second factor is the site load speed.If a site is good on these factors,it will sure has good ranking.
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