On Google Webmasters -> Labs-> Site Performance you can find how fast are your pages loading. You can even download plugin(i dont know if its made by google) to Firefox which is called Firebug and install PageSpeed. When running an analyze with this PageSpeed it shows you page performance and gives you a rating from 0 to 100. Also it shows you what is that you need to do to solve these problems and how to do that. It links to a google help pages for info. I hired programmers for my website who optimized all the pages on it and all of them have ratings now not lower than 93 out of 100, some even 97 and 98. I tried to test google pages, even google doesn't show that good results. So I`m curious if anybody know anything about it and if had any experience before. Also I will update you guy if anything will change in my SERP`s after those changes. Mike.
It was announced officially on the google webmasters blog a few months back that site speed is now a factor in ranking websites. Update: Here's the webmaster blog post by google - http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/04/using-site-speed-in-web-search-ranking.html
If you can keep it under 3 seconds, I wouldn't be too concerned. It is a small boost from what I understand. I would: 1. Compress all HTML and scripts by getting rid of blank white space, if you have the ability. Some of those content management system don't give you that flexibility. 2. Compress images. Just about every labs recommendation is to use server side compression. Since I run sites that need and use SSL, not feasible since it often returns screwed up pages often with server side compression. But if you doing an ad supported site only, might be worth it and save you bandwidth too.
Its something I've been testing lately and I haven't noticed a difference at all so far, i'm aware google is using it as a factor but for me I havent seen anything yet. Regardless though it will help your site become more 'sticky' and lower the bounce rate.
From what I can tell it doesn't matter that much. If you were incredibly bloated they would penalize you for that. But content takes bandwidth and a page with real content that loads slower than one without much content will rank better. I have been obsessing over it for a few weeks (we have 1500 web pages) and have enabled server side compression and optimized the graphics using hints from firebug. Tools still reports me as slower than 75% of web sites. All of the hints that are left are impossible for me to implement (loading content from multiple URLs for example). Google still sends us a ton of traffic. wiz
It is possible though, just hire some guy who knows what he is doing. My website had average on all the pages "Page Speed" in Firebug 55-60. Have 137 pages with more than average amount of content(text+a lot of imgaes). Now my programmer optimized it that average Page Speed is 94-95. And looked like everything was possible to do. And visually web-site didn't change at all. Now you feel like you are browsing this website from local computer. Right now main webiste is not updated yet with what he did. Once he will update it I will put a link to it. Honestly I thought it is not possible too and I just gave him this task. Really good work! I was impressed!
You would need to compress your images by hand. Photoshop does a great job of this. You could also download tons of different solution for this or use an online site like: http://www.imageoptimizer.net/
I`m using XnView. You can compress, resize, convert images all in one time. But now on my website, script is doing all that automatically when uploaded to the server
While it has been admitted by Google that speed is a factor it is thought to be very minor. However, increasing speed will vastly reduce your bounce rate and the time and number of pages viewed by visitors, so striving to improve it is a big positive regardless of SEO results.
Matt Cutts have already answered this before [video=youtube;B3zmP0W26M0]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3zmP0W26M0[/video]
Updates are done with performance of all the pages on my website. If testing with Speed Test(Firebug) previous version on the website was 55-60 out of 100. Now average is 94 out of 100. If somebody is interested in checking out PM for link.
all I know page speed is concerning on google caffeine... If google caffeine is already implemented surely speed is one of the factor now.
If your pages are very large with lots of images that aren't properly sized the page could potentially take a bit to load. Anything that loads in 5 seconds or less I wouldn't be too concerned with. If they are taking 15 seconds, 20 seconds or more then I would look into why and try to make them load faster. Not only for google, but for members or visitors of your site too. People don't usually stick around very long if a site or pages take too long to load. I don't recall the percentage google gave, but it was something like 1% or 2% serps based on page load. At the time it was for u.s. google serps only. Who knows if they will change that though.
I do not think that is a big deal personally. The one possible threat I could think of is the very long downtime and website cannot be accessed for a long period of time such as 1-2 days. If that happens I would no doubt most search engine will let that website rotten until the problem fixed. They do concern much more on search results quality and leading to website that never worked is not what they intended to do as well.
I agree that they more considered about search results, but if you have all that maintained good, so performance can be a plus for you. Lets say, if by your main keyword you are on position 8 in google on the 1st page and next your competitor is on position 7. Both of you have bad performance on the website, lets say around 60 by Page Speed. So more likely if you will make performance of you website to 95, then you might jump over that competitor and maybe few others. So lets see the results after new update on my website- after making a performance update. Right now I`m on the 2nd position in google by my main keyword. Keyword has 10000 searches a month and I`m getting around 800-900 visits. Page is optimized very good and has good and a lot back links by that key word, website is 2.5 years old, PR1. I will update you guys if any changes will occur soon. Webmasters Tools didin't updated performance speed yet for my website in the menu "Performance", so I guess google doesn't know yet that website has a speed of a light