Google Includes Speed Factor – Is Your Website Ready?

On April 9th, 2010 , Google finally declared that Website Speed really matters and they have now included this as one of the 200 signals which affects your rankings on Google.

The new algorithm is called as “Site Speed” which reflects how much time does a website takes to respond to a web request. If you have faster and relevant website then better are the chances of getting top rankings.



Google, in its post states that:

Speeding up websites is important — not just to site owners, but to all Internet users. Faster sites create happy users and we’ve seen in our internal studies that when a site responds slowly, visitors spend less time there.

I completely agree to this point made by Google that Site Speed makes the user experience better. In past, we also read a guest article – “Faster Web Sites For Happier Visitors And Better Conversion Rates” in which the author told us why speed of a website matters and he contributed some tips in short which can be taken in order to speed up the website. If you haven’t read it then you must go and read that out.

Earlier, I didn’t used to bother much about my blog speed but as the blog traffic grew; the need of resources started growing up and the blog loading time was something like 20-25 seconds that time. Then I took some steps to optimize my blog speed and brought the loading time to 5-10 seconds which is considered good and it has really improved the overall experience of my blog visitors.

If you are having slow site speed then don’t get disappointed as Google have also stated that this signal doesn’t carries much weight right now as much the relevance of a page matters. But still that doesn’t means that you don’t need to optimize the speed of your website.

I strongly suggest you to optimize your website site speed in order to improve your visitors experience. If that is better then hopefully you will earn better profits with your website.

TIP: Take help of Google Webmasters inbuilt Site Performance tool. This will tell you the sectors on which you have to work on to improve your site speed. The tool also tells the average loading time of all your pages.

So readers, What’s your opinion on the site speed factor that has now been included as a ranking factor. Do you really bother to optimize your website speed or you are just happy that your website is opening quickly at your home(which is the only thing that matters to you)?

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25 thoughts on “Google Includes Speed Factor – Is Your Website Ready?”

    1. It’s actually not a hard thing as you might think. Just some simple steps can lead to an optimized website with better loading times. Most specifically, try to reduce the size of images and compress or avoid(too much) javascript on the page.

  2. I guess that “Site Speed” is going effective as I see the huge difference of my blog traffic after change my blogger template. Before my blog take so much time for load, but now I change my blogger template and it load very fast than before. Now I also notice the difference of keyword ranking improvement of my blog. I think this might be effect of “google site speed”.
    .-= chandan@work at home jobs´s last blog ..Make money blogging take time =-.

    1. Yeah man, I understand the problem with blogger..With blogger there is restriction on how you can optimize the page like you cannot use gzip which is very important but still you must try to reduce too many images with high sizes, which I think is a common thing in most of the blogs running on blogger platform.

      I just checked your blog and I must say it is loading better from the earlier template which was bulky in images.

  3. I used to worry about my site speed a lot but it is not so much a factor anymore. Regardless of whether or not Google will be using site speed as a factor for page rank, I will probably not alter my site. It’s just not worth the trouble and besides, I am pretty confident that my site is running at optimum speed.
    .-= Chris@google page rank´s last undefined ..If you register your site for free at =-.

    1. Yes, I checked your blog and I must say that you don’t need to worry about site speed as it loads perfectly within 5 seconds.

  4. Yeah I saw this and it really does make a difference – if you have a slow loading site, people are going to bounce and big G recognizes this. I have had to re-do some of my store sites to be more streamlined because the product pictures just create a painful loading time. Slim and trim is the way to go as much as possible.
    .-= David´s last blog ..Make Money With Adsense =-.

  5. Hey, thanks for posting, great comments. Speed is important when waiting on a webpage to load. Everyone is in a big hurry and I’ve been reading more and more about people using splash pages as their opt in page because of the speed that it will load.
    Thanks for mentioning the Google Webmaster Performance tool, I didn’t know about that, but definitely want to check it out.
    .-= Dan Johnson´s last blog ..Comment on Will Outsourcing Your SEO Increase Your MLM Leads? by Tweets that mention Will Outsourcing Your SEO Increase Your MLM Leads? | Dan’s Internet Marketing Business Blog — Topsy.com =-.

  7. Wow I didn’t know that this would now be a part of Google’s rankings. Is it explicitly stated? Or are you inferring that this is true by the language in the statement from Google? If it is in fact a part of how they rank order websites… it could be revolutionary and it might make for some interesting new service-type businesses
    .-= Jimvesting´s last blog ..Jimvesting.com’s New Header Compromise, A Fresh New Look! =-.

  8. Honestly speaking, I don’t think that this will have much effect on the search rankings. In the past, Google has been talking about such things and many other factors. While we should consider these factors, their weightage can’t be much.

    1. yup, its true that it won’t affect much in the rankings and even Google told that “only less than 1% of search queries are affected by the site speed signal”. But still optimizing the site speed is necessary if we are thinking to enhance the user experience and also it reduces bounce rate.

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