Google is God when it comes to search – more than 70% of traffic to majority of blogs / sites comes from Google. Most of you know than Google has around 200 parameters on which it ranks a particular webpage.
It has now added one more parameter that will determine where your site is placed in search rankings – Site Speed.
We have been hearing about google making noise about site speed for quite sometime, and hence it included features like “site performance” in Webmaster tools to benchmark your site speed. Google has also released a firefox addon called “page speed” which will evaluates the performance of web pages and gives suggestions for improvement.
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.
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.
This announcement is first sign of things to come – Although, currently this change will affect around 1% of all the search queries, over coming months and years this percentage is going to increase for sure.
This is an especially important announcement for bloggers, who use CMS like wordpress to publish their blogs. Many times in bid to add new functionality (through plugins or modules) to your blog, the blog speed is compromised that could cost you site the your search rankings.
If you have not already, it is high time to look at your site speed in the bid to retain your Google ranking position. If you are a site owner, webmaster or a web author, here are some free tools Google suggests that you should look at:
- 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.
Note: Would love to know form readers as to what do you think is a good benchmark speed for page load. Trak.in takes about 5-6 seconds to load on average – what about your site?
Well. trak.in is using thesis :) m sure it will load fast. But yes with the latest cache plugins, all of my websites are loading within 5-6 seconds. I mainly use W3 Super cache. As far as page speed is concerned, i think it is a right move by google as i have seen websites ranked higher which have a very very slow load time and might even go upwards of 15 seconds. This destroys the web experience
If one is using blog platform like wordpress wp super cash is a good plugin to enhance page load as it creates static pages which are served quickly instead of creating pages by a number of database queries. By implementing this i have been able to decrease my page load time
Google wont give huge weight to this parameter for now .if they choose to stick with speed..It will be a huge change in their search result ,because lot of web sites loading their pages as plain html with full content.(now they have to strip of the unwanted things and move that to ajax .)
The people who uses CMS ,will have less impact.because once Google put more weight age onspeed.The CMS should have to change the method of page loading.For user it will be just like a normal update.
too goood arun and thanks alot :)
My blog currently takes around 7 seconds to load on average, it took a lot of work to get it down from 13 seconds before. It will not affect webmasters directly as most bloggers and webmasters try their best to keep the load time within 10 seconds.
This is a pretty good move by Google and I’m sure users will be free from the frustration of such sites which take up a hell lot of time. Most sites may offload flash and other heavy content.