I keep hearing more and more about this and I would like to know everyone's opinion on how important it is to Google. Will site speed improve your SERPS?
It is clearly important. It is my experience. But you must remember, however, that there is only one of many many factors to consider. But if you want a site that is perfect from the SEO perspective, you should also work with website speed. And there is a lot you can do to get faster....
At the moment, although it is a ranking factor, google have said that not a lot of weight is given to it. You can find the full information here; http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/04/using-site-speed-in-web-search-ranking.html With that said, there is nothing to say that this wont change soon or at some point in the future and, at the end of the day, there is *no* excuse for having a slow website. Would you want to wait around while a site loads, or would you leave and move onto another? Most people would choose the latter.
keep in mind that if you dont wanna lose your visitor...as much as possible make the loading speed faster people tend to leave when it takes ages before it loaded
Even if the search engines didn't exist, quick loading sites is an important factor for good web design. Not many people will spend two to five minutes waiting for your site to load
Hello. Website opening speed is very important to both Google and your customers. Website that opens in 3-5 seconds is good. If it takes too long to load the page, you will lost a lot of customers.
It is definitely a factor, a speed difference of a half second can impact ranking. Also if hte site is slow it may take months for it to regain ranking.
these are not the days of dial up and most people cannot wait more than a few seconds for their site to load. you need to improve on speed if you want to get more visitors as a slow site will annoy many people especially the youngsters who know nothing of the days when we were used to waiting a lifetime for sites to open.