Do Website Speed Determines Google Rankings ?

Here is a quick update from official google blog post and as well from Matt Cutts blog that "Google is determining the website speed to determine the rankings of the website in Google results".

Don’t get panic, Just read what Official Google post says,

"While site speed is a new signal, it doesn’t carry as much weight as the relevance of a page. Currently, 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 at this point."

But this doesn’t seem to be a good idea though, because consider two sites are of equal quality in all points. but one is slower where one site is faster but delivers slightly worse quality, and another is three seconds slower but delivers great quality and will it be fair enough to serve the faster site at top ? and suppose if you have some large images and advertisements, obviously site will get little slow .

Here are some valuable tips to reduce the page load time and Improve the Speed of your Site:

1. Speeding up websites is important – Faster sites create happy users.

2. Reduce the number of graphics on your blog.

3. Lower flash content and multimedia objects. If it is necessary, you can use it, but try to reduce it.

4. Remove unwanted sounds and videos.

5. Use simple and neat looking template.

6. If you have lengthy content, try to break down into 2 or 3 pages.

7. Less Use Of Javascripts And External Scripts.

8. Use formatted CSS and java-script instead of lengthy file have use-less gaps.

9. Avoid use of iframes.

10. Use CSS sprites instead of separate images.

Here are some free tools that you can use to evaluate the speed of your site:

1. Page Speed – an open source Firefox/Firebug add-on that evaluates the performance of web pages and gives suggestions for improvement.

2. YSlow – a free tool from Yahoo! that suggests ways to improve website speed.

3. WebPagetest – It shows a waterfall view of your pages’ load performance plus an optimization checklist.

4. In Webmaster Tools – Labs > Site Performance shows the speed of your website as experienced by users around the world.

5. Many other tools on code.google.com/speed

Thanks to Official Google post for all these free tools.

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