Google to add site speed to their algorithm?
It now seems to be official that Google are considering adding website speed to their ranking algorithms. This means that they may now use the speed your pages load as one of the factors in determining your page ranking in their index.
You can hear it from the horse’s mouth in this interview with Matt Cutts of Google (The discussion on site speed is about 2:40m into the video).
Before we all start panicking and loosing sleep over this one, we need to consider a few things:
1. You should already be concerned about the speed of your site! – Speed is a significant factor in making your site appealing to visitors. If each page takes 30 seconds to load, visitors will not stay long, and you have a problem irrespective of whether Google list your site.
2. Given point 1 above, Google are not going to put a site with less relevant content that loads in 1 second ahead of a site with great content that loads in 3 seconds. Their mission is to deliver the content people are searching for, so the best way of ensuring a good ranking is still going to be having a site with great content that gives searchers what they are looking for.
3. Google have been using speed as a factor in their adwords quality score for a while now, and I have seen very people commenting that they are being penalised for the speed of their site in this area, so it would seem not to be a key factor. Google use over 200 ranking factors is indexing sites, each with different weightings. I do not believe that speed will be a heavily weighted factor.
Assuming that you do not see the speed of your site as an issue for a visitor experience point of view, I would suggest that you would be better spending resources on improving, enhancing your site content and ensuring it clearly communicates your message in an interesting & informative way, and on building good quality back links to your site. Once this job is done, then by all means spend time “minifying your javascript” to speed up your site.
In other words speed of your site should always be a consideration, but it should not become more important just because it has been added to Google’s agenda!!