subject: Google Is Watching Your Website Speed - Are You? [print this page] Google's introduction of site speed as a component in their ranking algorithm means that webmasters must pay even more attention to the loading speed of their websites. The fact that Google went out of its way to tell us about this new ranking factor is telling in itself since Google will not usually publicize new parameters in its successful algorithm.
According to the announcement, the speed penalty was introduced following various experiments done by Google on the impact of site speed on internet users.
But the results of the experiment comes as no surprise even for someone that has started to use the Internet recently - users prefer websites that load faster and tend to spend more time on such websites.
The search giant, however, has been eager to remind us that website speed is not the most important factor when ranking web pages. The quality and relevance of information is still the determining factor but if your website speed is slow you will receive a Google penalty.
With this in mind it's a good idea for all webmasters to measure the speed if their websites to make sure they are not dropping in the SERPs because of a Google speed penalty.
How Can Google Know My Page Speed?
But first, it is vital that one understand the basics of how Google's algorithm determines your website speed and thus your SERP ranking. The search engine uses two main factors when it comes to speed assessment.
First, your website will receive a higher speed ranking if it responds faster to Googlebot. Googlebot is the web crawling tool used by Google to find and index websites.
Second, your website will also receive a good speed ranking if it records a faster loading time on Google Toolbar than your competition. Google wan't to help you check your website speed and has kindly added a page speed report to webmaster tools, it can be found inthe 'lab' section.
You can use the tool and its report to see you how fast your website loads as compared to other websites. Once you are armed with the information of where you page ranks in the speed hierarchy, you can start to make the necessary code and structure changes to make it respond faster.
You first priority should be to make sure you have no SLOW pages on your site. Pages that take two seconds or more to load and pages that are marked as SLOW in the Google Webmaster Tools need to be improved to avoid a Google penalty for your website speed.
When you have no slow pages left just go on and make all your pages load in less than a second. Read on to see why this is important.
A quick loading website is not only better search engine rankings and avoiding the Google speed penalty, there's additional benefits.
A website optimized for speed reduces the bandwidth required on your hosting service thus reducing your overall hosting costs.
Faster websites also give a better browsing experience as users are able to get information faster as they can navigate through your website easily.
Further, websites optimized for speed work better when accessed on a mobile phones, PDAs and other devices that do not have the same level of processing memory as your standard laptop or desktop computer.
Even though you can have a mobile version of your website, usually this comes with trimmed down graphics and other aspects of your site. Some users will want to view your site in full HTML on their phone or PDA and a faster loading website will have better chances of successfully loading on such devices.
As a webmaster, there are a number of free tools that you can use to increase the loading speed of your website. I have listed three of the more popular ones below:
Page Speed
Page Speed is an open sourced plug-in for Mozilla. It evaluates the speed of your website and gives you suggestions on how to improve your website speed.
Page Speed runs tests on the architectural configuration of both your web server and your website's front end code. After running these tests, it gives you a report on your website speed and suggestions on how to improve the speed of your website.
Yslow
Yslow is a free website performace software from Yahoo. After measuring the speed of your website it suggests changes you can make to improve performance.
Yslow is a Firefox add-on and is integrated with the Firebug software for website development. It shows statistics and a report. It also gives you suggestions on how best to improve the speeds of your website using best practices.
Yslow comes with a couple of other tools for performance tuning, including Smush.Use it and JSLint to further enhance your website performance. Yslow is a Yahoo product but is still useful for avoiding the Google speed penalty.
SSEL Speed Tools
The website speed test at Secret Search Engine Labs will analyze how fast a page on your site is loading and give you tips on how to improve it.
Instant Site Speed Improvement
There are several factors that affects page load speeds on your website, many of them technical and best solved by your webmaster or developer.
There's still some changes you can do yourself to improve page load speeds as long as you have a little experience with HTML and making web pages.
Reduce the amount of images, animations, flash and audio. Then reduce the size and quality of images and audio to a level suitable for the web. Make the page shorter by splitting long pages into several shorter. Remove redundant HTML, CSS and Javascript code from the page source code. Don't hot link to images and Javascript on other domains, but instead keep a copy of it on your own server.
And remember to keep an eye on the Google Webmaster Tools to see how your website compares to your competition.
