The importance of website speed

August 2, 2010

You may have heard alot out the importance of page speed and fast loading times for your pages.

Well Google has recognised that this is important for all web users and has included a new signal in their search ranking algorithms: site speed. In laymans terms, ‘Site speed’ reflects how quickly a website responds to web requests.

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 studies that when a site responds slowly, visitors spend less time on it.

But faster sites don’t just improve user experience; recent data shows that improving site speed also reduces operating costs i.e. server costs. Google will use a variety of sources to determine the speed of a site relative to other sites.

While site speed is important, it doesn’t carry as much weight as the relevance of a page so don’t panic! Currently, fewer than 1% of search queries are affected by the site speed signal and the signal for site speed only applies for users searching in English on Google.com at this time (it will implemented across the board soon we hear).

So in summary, we encourage you to start looking at your site’s speed i.e. reducing image sizes, not using Flash, showing text in web text rather than images, to not only to improve your ranking in search engines, but also to improve user experience on the web.