Back in December 2009 Google made it public that site speed would be a factor in how your website ranks within their search engine. Well a few weeks ago Google rolled out some testing and started using site speed in their algorithm, which contains 200+ different factors when ranking a website. Will site speed over take actual relevance a website gives to viewers, no it will not. It will be something though that can be an easy fix for most webmasters.
What Is Site Speed Anyhow?
Site speed is the time it takes for your website to fully load. From Google webmaster tools you can check your site’s speed for free from their make tweaks to try and increase the speed. Tweaks can be simple resizing of your images, downsizing your code watching what widgets are taking longer to load and maybe eliminate them. It could also be your web hosting company, so simply switching to a new host or upgrading your hosting plan (VPS are pretty cheap) will boost your load times. Shared hosting is just as it sounds, you share a server with hundreds and in some cases thousands of other websites that are all hosted together. The server can be bogged down from all of the requests being made from these websites so the great deal you thought you were getting for $3.99/month can actually be hurting you.
How Can My Slow Site Hurt Me?
Google has over 200 factors they use when determining how and where to rank a website for any given keyword search. Nobody knows what every single factor, not even Google employees know them all as different design teams work on different parts of the algorithm and do not even communicate with one another. Where the site speed ranks in importance is not known, but what is known is they have begun testing it within their algorithm and in the future could be implementing it 100% to rank all sites within their index. So if you have a slow loading site you might want to look into what is slowing it down and try to fix it. Not to mention it doesn’t hurt to have your site load faster so your visitors are not waiting for everything to load.
I will keep an eye on this and let you know of future changes Google or any other search engine plans to make when going full board with using this technique to rank websites within their algorithm.
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