Site speed now affects Google rankings – but not that much

This SEO news has been brought to you by Just Search; Experts in internet marketing and PPC

The Official Google Webmaster Central Blog announced on Friday that Google will now take site speed into account when ranking sites. This is a good move by Google as speeding up the web is always going to be a positive thing. It also makes good sense that it is only going to affect a site’s rankings if the page runs really slowly. As always, there are no hard and fast rules from Google as to how fast a site should run, but there are a number of tools to help analyse what’s slowing down a site and what may be causing an issue.

1. YSlow: This plugin for Firefox also gives some tips on how to fix issues that might be occurring. It gives advice on using CSS Sprites, re-sizing images and reducing HTTP requests etc.
2. Firebug Net tab: The Net tab for Firebug gives you a pretty good idea as to what is taking the most time when loading the site. It also shows what part of the request the browser is waiting for. This should give an indication if it’s waiting for a script (php, asp etc.) to load or if it’s just a slow connection.
3. Google Page Speed: This is Google’s own tool, so I’d recommend you also take a look at this.

It’s not really surprising that the rest of the blog post is spent reassuring us that it’s nowhere near as important as having relevant content on a page. In fact, Google goes on to say that this will affect less than 1% of search queries.

Simon Davies
SEO Programmer

My advice would be to use a bit of common sense, if you find yourself getting frustrated waiting for your site (and your Internet connection is not to blame), take a look at the various tools that are available: