When it comes to the web speed is always an advantage. Faster computers, faster chips, faster servers and faster connections are all about doing things faster. Speed is a measure of productivity, these days, and for Google part of how it sees your website’s ability to enhance the end-user experience.
For those who may be new to this post Google is about two things: quality in search (which it pursues assiduously) and quality in the end-user experience which it has started to pursue with a series of measures which include Google Instant, improvements in Google Instant functionality and new Chrome Browser functionalities like its recent ability to bring speech to search.
The speed at which your webpage performs and the speed at which it loads are now two metrics which Google uses to assess just how ‘good’ or ‘bad’ your website is from an end-user point of view. Fast websites (as you might have guessed) are deemed to be better because they do not make the end-user have to wait for everything to load while slow ones are not so good and will have their Google rankings docked as a result.
Here we get into two questions: How can you test your site speed to see if it really is at its optimum? And what do you do next?
Online Site Speed Test Tool
Google has provided an online site speed test tool which allows you to input your URL and get an assessment of the speed at which your site loads in the browser. More than that it also has specific suggestions which are designed to help make your site faster.
These usually include suggestions about setting cache expiry dates (which help sites load faster) for static graphic items on your website, suggestions to set up CSS Sprites and optimize images. Unless your website is breaking some pretty basic design rules you will find that most of the suggestions made by the Google Site Speed Test Tool fall into the province of advanced SEO which means that you will most likely have to go to your web developers for a little assistance.
The Google Site Speed Test Tool grades website speed out of 100. If you are not in the high 60s in terms of percentage then you really cannot afford to ignore it and any money spent will be worth it in terms of improvements in your Google ranking. If your website performs in the high 70s and 80s there is still room for improvement but it is not that critical and you can afford to put it on your list of things to do for a later date.
Fail to rise above the 55% mark for speed however and you have a major problem on your hands which you really need to address now.
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