Page Load Speed

In January 2010 Google began to roll out its most significant update for several years. Known as "Caffeine" this update has, for the first time applied page speed to the search engine algorithm. Google wants to speed up the internet, which is a noble intention, but we need to understand how this affects us.

Firstly, Google has to get it's data from somewhere, after all, how does it know how quickly your site pages load? The answer to this is that you unwittingly provide the information if you use Google Analytics. Google uses the information gathered to work out an average load time from all the users of your site. This currently seems to be quite a crude measurement, which is bound to be refined over time, but for now it is rudimentary to say the least.

Google has split sites into the top 20th percentile and the bottom 80th percentile. The important thing is to keep your site in the top 20th percentile at all times. This figure in terms of seconds is going to be an increasingly competitive moving target as time goes by. As site owners clean up their page code, the 20th percentile will become an increasingly costly place to be.

The whole issue of page load speed does raise some interesting questions;

1. The more content you include, the slower your page will load, so where is the perfect balance?

2. Is removing Google Analytics the answer?

3. If your site is used predominantly by mobile users (laptops on mobile connections) you will currently be penalised for slow loading times as Google measures actual data without applying the connection method into its algorithm.

4. What are the best ways to build sites in order to win the load speed war?

5. What do you do with your video and flash content?

6. Interestingly in our tests, Google Analytics code slowed our page load from 0.4 sec to 0.9 sec

Remember: Every element of your page will add to the page load speed, finding the balance between the need to get your message across to your visitors and having your pages load fast enough to rank well will ultimately determine whether your site will succeed or fail.

Good SEO starts with effective use of efficient coding. Unnecessary code should be discarded in favour of high speed page loading.

Page Load Speed

How can you measure your page loading speed? .......Yslow