Last week Google announced that it will use page load speed to help rank pages in its results. Just so you know, site speed reflects how quickly a website responds to web requests. The decision was made in response to feedback from users who (unsurprisingly) said that they preferred sites which loaded quickly. So, now that page load speed has been added to Google’s list of over 200 ranking factors, what should you do?
Well, not a lot to be honest. As it turns out, fewer than 1% of search queries will be affected by this change and, if you were going to be affected, then you would have been already. Nevertheless, with all this talk about site speed and page load times, why not use a free tool to evaluate the speed of your website…
- Page Speed – an open-source Firefox/Firebug Add-on. Webmasters and web developers can use Page Speed to evaluate the performance of their web pages and to get suggestions on how to improve them.
- WebPagetest – allows you to provide the URL of a webpage to be tested. Provides a waterfall of your page load performance as well as a comparison against an optimization checklist.
And, on a final note, with the focus now firmly turning towards user experience (in that fast loading webpages = happy users) is the end of slow to load Flash websites on the horizon? Add this to the fact that plugin technology is on the way out (think of the devices that don’t support Flash – the old iPhone, iPad…) and it certainly is not looking good for Flash heavy sites. We’ll just have to wait and see…
