Hybrid Forge

It’s official. Google now considers your website speed as one of the many parameters in its search ranking algorithms. Per Google, faster sites make for happier users, so they’ve decided to make the Internet a better place by encouraging faster sites.

“So what does that mean to me?”, you ask.

How Site Speed Affects Google Page Rank

Well, you probably don’t have to panic. According to Google, less than 1% of websites out there are affected by their recent change. Relevance is still the most important factor in page ranking. This includes content, keywords, back-links, and the rest of the traditional SEO factors.

But what it does mean is that for any two sites being equal in these, Google will now give advantage to the faster loading site. In a game where every advantage counts, don’t neglect your site speed.

Factors in Site Speed

There are many factors that can affect site speed. Your host is usually the prime suspect.

• Hosting on over-subscribed web servers or ISPs with slow Internet connections can seriously impact the performance of your site.
• Cheaping out on your hosting by selecting a shared hosting solution when you should get a dedicated server

That being said, in many cases the host is performing up to spec and may be choking on problems with the underlying website code. There are many other factors that can impact page load times:

• Poorly coded HTML – errors in the html can slow rendering times
• Poorly structured HTML – how the page elements are loaded can severely impact the speed that relevant information is presented to the user
• CSS reference errors – timeouts for missing images really impact site speed
• Flash – well, maybe it’s not only Apple taking a shot at Adobe these days, but one sure way to slow down your page load time is to use Flash
• Javascript – so you’re smart enough to use Javascript, but you can really improve page performance by improving how you load the Javascript libraries

Site Speed and eCommerce

There’s so much more going on under the hood of an eCommerce site than the typical website. Site performance is already a key factor in product conversion. Current shoppers are already expecting page load times of less than 2 seconds. Now page load speeds will not only have an impact on conversions, but it could start to affect your site traffic if you start to drop rankings compared to other merchants with better performing websites.

If you’re using Magento, check out our Magento Optimization blog post.

What Can I Do to Improve Site Speed

There are many things that can be done. If you want to see you your site is performing, the first thing you need to do is measure it empirically. There are several tools out there that can help you with this.

• Page Speed – a Firefox add-on
• Yslow – a tool by Yahoo! and a Firefox add-on
• WebPageTest – a web-based tool for testing the speed of your site
• Google Webmaster Tools – has a site performance tool

Once you know how your site is performing it’s just a matter of cleaning up the areas that are negatively affecting your site speed.