Speed now a factor in search results? Well…kinda

With Matt Cutts’ announcement that the speed your website loads at is a factor (albeit a small one) in ranking on Google, my guess is that we are going to see a lot of people doing the right thing for the wrong reason. What am i talking about?

Why SHOULD you want your pages to load fast? Well, because that is a HUGE factor in keeping readers and more importantly keeping them happy. Period. Point. End of Story. This is WAY less ambiguous than the question of why should you write every page about 1 subject and make it clear what it is about. (Write for the reader and NOT for the Search Engines…). This is common sense.

Even at that, Google gave us clear signals that this was coming.

That all said, some people will now have a renewed focus on speed for whatever reason. They want to know…how does this impact me. While it is too new to provide a definitive answer for sure outside of conjecture based on statements from Google (and that ain’t my style), here are my empirical observations to date and I will be adding more as I go along.

Google APPEARS to be using this as a ranking factor mostly on the slowest of sites, and far less as a factor among sites with reasonable load times. So the thing to do is to look at your load times in Google Webmaster Tools under “Performance”, see how your major pages are doing and work on the slow ones to speed them up. Google also provides links to other useful speed tests.

In WordPress, this may mean caching plug-ins, less images on a given page, lighter images all around, etc, etc…you may even opt for better hosting, but something to keep in mind is this. Better hosting is usually LESS of a factor in speed than is poor construction of the theme / site.

I will be detailing some how to’s in the near future so that you can pick up the pace of page loading.