Site Speed Affects Website Rankings In Google

We have always known that site speed affects search engine spiders from crawling websites.  If your website is too slow, then search spiders give up trying to crawl and index pages of your site.  This is usually an indexation problem that ultimately affects rankings of a website.

However, on Friday, Google officially announced that they are using site speed in web search ranking.  Site Speed is another signal that Google is using within their criteria to select the most relevant web page to users’ search queries.
Google’s rationale is that through their own research that faster websites create a better user experience.  Users spend more time on a website if it is fast and less time if it is slow.  Faster websites also reduce operating expenses.

Google hasn’t disclosed exactly how they are calculating response times of websites, but has said it is using a “variety of sources”.  Within Google’s Webmaster Tools under the Labs tab on the Dashboard, “Site Performance” provides a level of reporting of how fast your website is responding to user requests.  It provides site speed trends for the last year and the speed of several pages delivered from your website.

A “Page Speed” tool is available to install onto Firefox browsers.   Other tools available are YSlow from Yahoo! and WebPagetest as recommended by Google.

At the moment, Site Speed does not have a huge impact on rankings as Google claims that it current affects fewer than 1% of rankings.  It also currently only applies to English language websites.