This month Matt Cutts has proclaimed on his blog that Google have decided to incorporate site speed (loading times) in their search algorithm. What this means from a practical sense is that if your website takes a long time to load, it may be penalised by Google’s new ranking system.

On the Google Webmaster’s blog it states:

“Speeding up websites is important — not just to site owners, but to all Internet users. Faster sites create happy users and we’ve seen in our internal studies that when a site responds slowly, visitors spend less time there. But faster sites don’t just improve user experience; recent data shows that improving site speed also reduces operating costs. Like us, our users place a lot of value in speed — that’s why we’ve decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings. We use a variety of sources to determine the speed of a site relative to other sites.”

If you are worried about your website’s speed you can use the following tools to check out how your site performs: 

  • Page Speed, an open source Firefox/Firebug add-on that evaluates the performance of web pages and gives suggestions for improvement.
  • YSlow, a free tool from Yahoo! that suggests ways to improve website speed.
  • WebPagetest shows a waterfall view of your pages’ load performance plus an optimization checklist.
  • In Webmaster Tools, Labs > Site Performance shows the speed of your website as experienced by users around the world as in the chart below.

    • For more information: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/

    I don’t think this change is a major problem for most websites, as many sites do not take very long to load. It may however be a problem with websites that have loads of pictures/ Flash (which I dislike with a passion!) or video content.