Search Marketing Insights (Search Done Smarter)
Site Speed: The Latest Addition to Google’s Algorithm
By: Jamie Keaney, Senior Search Strategist
Last year Google began hinting that site load time may become a part of the algorithm, and last week those hints became fact. Google has officially announced that site speed is indeed a part of the algorithm, as it is important to user satisfaction with a Web site.
The Update
This should come as no surprise, as the update has been swirling around the Webmaster rumor mills for months and Google itself plans to go live with their “caffeine” update to make their own results appear faster to users.
While this is a new addition to the algorithm, it is a small factor. Before you go rebuilding your Web site to make it lightning fast consider what remain the major factors in Googles algorithm: relevancy of content to the query, the number and relevance of in-bound links, reputation, and unique, valuable content still carry more weight in the algorithm than site speed.
According to Google, “fewer than 1% of search queries are affected by the site speed signal in our implementation and the signal for site speed only applies for visitors searching in English on Google.com.” Let’s put that into perspective. If there are nearly 3 billion queries each month on Google.com and 91 million per day, less than 1 million queries per day will be affected by this change.
Also, load time itself is not a constant in the algorithm; rather, the algorithm incorporates load time specific to each query as a comparison of all the Web sites that appear in the results for that query.
Improving Site Speed
Even though you may not need to panic about the algorithm change, it is always a good idea to be proactive about site speed, purely from a usability perspective. Users make decisions in milliseconds and any delay can cause friction.
If your Web site is slow, there are some simple tools you can use to gauge your Web site’s speed (some of which are referenced by Google in the above link):
- Page Speed – a Firefox add-on that allows users to get free advice on how to improve the Web site loading time
- YSlow – a Firebug add-on by Yahoo that suggests ideas for making your Web site faster
- Pingdom Tools – offers a free Web site load time estimator
- Google’s Webmaster Tools – Google’s lab section has a site performance tool that shows the speed of the Web site
- Pagetest – developed by AOL and is an IE specific tool to gauge site speed
If you do find that your Web site loads slowly, you should work with your Search agency and IT team to resolve the problems. Here are a few basic starting points when investigating how to reduce your page load time:
- Minimize HTTP requests & DNS lookups
- Maximize Parallel Downloads
- Combine external JavaScript
- Combine Stylesheets to under 3 if possible – remove excessive CSS coding
- Ensure that your images have dimensions labeled
- Compress images
- Avoid redirects (JavaScript)
- Minify size of HTML coding, CSS file size, JavaScript file size and images
In Conclusion
Google does care about how quickly sites within their results load, though for now the algorithm change only affects a small percentage of queries. Regardless of the algorithm change, however, you should think of site speed as a usability function above anything else. To keep your visitors engaged with your site, get them to the information they want to see as quickly as you can with the least amount of friction possible.
