Google confirm site speed is a ranking factor

On Friday Google confirmed that they are now using site speed as a ranking factor for websites. In November of last year Google indicated that they were looking at making website load speed a factor for rankings and began rolling out some tools to help people monitor their website load times.

Google have said that website load speed is only a small element of rankings factors on a website and have said that fewer than 1% of search queries are affected by site speeds. The site speed ranking factor is also only relevant to searches on Google.com in English at the moment. It probably won’t be long until Google role this new ranking factor out to all languages and versions of Google, so it’s worth looking at the load time of your website now.

There are a couple of ways that Google measure the loads speed of a website including how your website responds to the GoogleBot and how quickly site speed is recorded for users with the Google Toolbar.
Google include information about how quickly a website is seen to load in their Google Webmaster Tools. Available under the Labs menu of Webmaster Tools this tools shows some tips on how to speed up the load speed of pages on your site.

Some of the things Google recommend to help load speed of websites are as follows:

• Combining the content of CSS files so that you are only calling on one file rather than 3 or 4 external files
• Combining the content of JavaScript files so that you are only calling on one file rather than 3 or 4 external files
• Not pulling too many files from external websites (external DNS lookups)
• Enabling Gzip compression of files which are loaded on a page, such as CSS and JavaScript.

There are other website speed tools which can also help you monitor what is going on with your website including the Y-Slow plugin for FireFox.