I love speed on the Internet, and few things on the net frustrate me more than when a site takes eons of time to load. Often I even leave a site before it has finished loading if it is too slow. Maybe I lose out on something very important when I do that, but I simply don’t always have the patience to watch a blank screen for very long.
Being a speed addict, I fully support and embrace the push for a speedier internet by a number of big internet actors – among them Google and Yahoo. Google says “Let’s make the Web faster.” I love it, as a matter of fact. The faster a web site is, generally the better the user experience, in my opinion.
Google has provided web designers and web masters with very strong incentives to work hard for faster page loading. They are launching instant search, and have now officially announced that they consider website speed when determining search engine rankings:
You may have heard that here at Google we’re obsessed with speed, in our products and on the web. As part of that effort, today we’re including a new signal in our search ranking algorithms: site speed. Site speed reflects how quickly a website responds to web requests.
As far as I can see, both the average internet user, serious web site owners and Google have a common interest in speedy web sites.
However, Google’s announcement also means that web site speed is now officially an important factor in Search Engine Optimization (SEO). I don’t think anybody outside Google knows exactly what the weight of the speed factor is relative to other SEO factors, but personally I have a feeling that it is significant, and that it may become even more significant over time.
Partly because of some experiences I have had with instabilities in a web hosting service I used and partly because I want my sites to rank well in the search engines, I have spent a lot of time lately reading, pondering and implementing all sorts of changes in order to speed up my sites. It is actually a huge job. So over the next few weeks I will write a series of posts about this topic. I will write about web hosting, server stability, server speed, server configuations, and a number of ways to speed up web sites.
