By 2012 South Korea is expected to roll out 1Gbps broadband in its largest cities, whilst providing 50mb-100mb speeds everywhere else. This rate of development certainly makes the UK’s current broadband situation a bit embarrassing, even more so when you think that we’re getting excited by the offering of 40mb broadband by 2012! Still, there may be some sort of saviour for us now that the boffins at Google are including page-loading time in their SEO algorithm.
November last year was the first time we heard mutterings from Google that they were going to take account of loading time as part of their page ranking system and as of last week it all became official. The aptly names Site speed will quite simply outline how quickly a website responds to different web requests.
So how did Google come to their decision to include Site speed as a deciding factor in their algorithm? Well, for a few unlucky users, Google slowed down their search results – albeit by 400ms – and monitored the change in browsing habits. Now considering that Google is one of the quickest websites on the internet, you would think that adding a small server side delay would go almost unnoticed, but surprisingly this couldn’t be further from the truth. The number of search requests carried out by users dropped by between 0.2% and 0.6%, which for Google meant a loss up to 1.8 million searches per day!
Whilst it may seem obvious then, to say that users get great satisfaction out of fast loading websites, what is truly surprising is the small margin between what we consider a quick website and a slow website.
The next question that is probably on your minds is how exactly will Google measure the speed of websites. Search Engine Land have stated that Google will use a combination of the load time of pages as measured by the Google Toolbar and also the way that a page responds to Googlebot. Other sources have also speculated that the new Speed Report section of Google Analytics will be used, along with other elements of the analytics system due to the sheer amount of data it holds about user/website interaction.
So what does this mean for developers? Well, it goes without saying that a fast loading website is beneficial to both developer and user, but is it now the case that the developer needs to keep one eye on the scales to protect their page rank? The answer to this is somewhat unclear. On one hand this new addition to the Google algorithm is only one of about 200 criteria in use, so the outweighing factors are likely to remain with the relevance and quality of content. This is after all Google’s core philosophy; they themselves state that owners shouldn’t overestimate the impact of page speed on rankings. However, with Google making such a public statement of this update, web developers would be somewhat naive to ignore it.
Here at Big Dot Media, speed optimisation is an area of our expertise we share with all our partners to help them realise their creative ambitions on the web. As part of this, we are now offering a free website analysis that outlines any areas of improvement that will help increase a websites search page rank. If this is something you are interested in, get in touch with us and we’ll get back to you with our findings!
In conclusion then it would seem that the arrival of Site Speed from Google isn’t going to cause developers to put their websites on such large scale crash diets that we see dramatic speed increases whilst we’re stuck with outdated broadband. What is safe to say however is that web developers now have no excuse when it comes to producing over sized websites dependant on large images, flash and multiple external scripts. For the first time, website speed is a matter of compliance not just good practice.
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It is pretty eyebrow-raising that 400ms can make that much of a difference, as to whether a user sticks around or not, makes you think..!
It is true though, that by default we should always optimise for speed anyway, which should go without saying.