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Google Drop Search Ranking of Slow Sites

ByLiew Cheon-Fong

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[image by jpctalbot]

Google has started including “site speed” when ranking your website in search engine results. Slow site might drop ranking. How do you check?

Site speed means how fast is your website response to a web request (a visit). Admit it, we love websites that load in a blink. Google’s decision can be totally understood.

How to check website speed?

No, not using a timer and load your website.

There are some free tools for you (site owner or webmaster) to evaluate the speed of your site:

  • Page Speed — A Firefox add-on. Required: Firefox & Firebug add-on.
  • YSlow — A free add-on for Firefox from Yahoo! that suggest ways to improve website speed. Required: Firefox & Firebug add-on.
  • WebPagetest — web tool. show waterfall view of your site load performance plus optimization checklist.
  • Google Webmaster Tools’ “site performance” — shows the speed of your website as experienced by users around the world.
  • Many more tools

HELP! My site is slow!

Don’t panic.

From Google:

While site speed is a new signal, it doesn’t carry as much weight as the relevance of a page. Currently, fewer than 1% of search queries are affected by the site speed signal in our implementation and the signal for site speed only applies for visitors searching in English on Google.com at this point. We launched this change a few weeks back after rigorous testing. If you haven’t seen much change to your site rankings, then this site speed change possibly did not impact your site.

While you don’t need to worry much. It is always good to improve your site performance.

Try the tools mentioned above and do what you know & can do, such as enable gzip, combine JavaScript/CSS, minimize DNS lookups, etc.

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