I know google start analyze your speed and use it on SERP One of site on my server got hit and "On average, pages in your site take 5.8 seconds to load (updated on Jun 16, 2010). This is slower than 80% of sites." state on Google Webmaster tool. It impact the SERP and got 20% traffic drop from Google. My question is, how slow is a slow site and Google will start punish you?
It depends on the sites that are competing for your terms. If they are faster and offer the same quality of resources, they will win. As a general rule, I try to make my pages under 3.0 second loads. This usually tells me I'm faster than 60% of the sites. I found that this has saved my rankings in a lot of areas.
Website loading speed is just a "tiny" factor in my opinion. Your website ranking won't being suffered just because of slow loading page, if not that much like 2 minutes or more to be loaded. The most evidence problem is your website has a long downtime such as 2 days and more to see a dropped in ranking really.
The loading speed of your websites will not affect website ranking and google does not punish you for that.
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/04/using-site-speed-in-web-search-ranking.html http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/site-speed/ How can you guys say the speed is not important!
Google has its own page load speed addon for Mozilla now... runs through firebug. Very much worth having.
Yepp. It gives you a "Page Speed Score", not a time spend in download like how many seconds. The time eventually shown at Google Webmaster Tool