“There is more to life than simply increasing its speed”

Not as far as Google is concerned, it seems.

Google, the internet search engine, have recently announced that the speed of a website will affect the ranking of that website in their search results. Sites that are judged to be slow will be placed further down the list of search results.

The two ways in which Google plans to measure the speed of a web-page are: The Googlebot will measure how fast each page it crawls responds to its requests; and the Google toolbar will be sending load times back to Google.

What it means for you

It’s early days, and the strategy needs some refinement, but the basic premise is a sensible one.

When researching the relationship between speed of service and user engagement, the search provider slowed the delivery of their own results pages for a period, during which there was a noticeable drop in the numbers of clicks on search results. The obvious conclusion: slower web-pages mean a negative user experience. And an unhappy user is a user who abandons the website, and Google.

In other words, Google needs to deliver good, high-quality, well-built websites to their users – and if your site isn’t one of this number, then you can’t expect them to give your website priority in the search results listing over one that is.

For site owners, and particularly those thinking of paying for a website, site speed has become another point for assessing the quality of their site and the effectiveness of that site as a business tool.

Conclusion

There are over 200 rules which Google uses to evaluate a website, so this announcement shouldn’t place undue emphasis on site speed alone. In fact, a demotion in ranking should only affect 1% of websites at the minute, according to Google’s Matt Cutts – content is king, and a well-written, relevant site will do better than a fast one.

However, speed is a factor that developers and business owners ignore at their peril. Not only are Google’s findings about user disengagement with slower websites very telling, but any threat to search engine result positioning needs to be addressed. With over 65% of the search market-share, Google’s new ranking policy affects everyone that wants their website to be found on the web.

If you haven’t considered the speed of your websites before, you should – and now.

Other information

You can read more about the importance of site speed to Google ranking on the Google Webmaster Central Blog.

Google's share of the search-market is provided by Nielsen reports February 2010 US rankings.