Google wants your website to be speedy
Posted on 29. Jan, 2010 by Dave in SEO
We all know that Google is obsessed with speed. When we made the switch in 1998 from Yahoo to Google for our searching needs we did so because Google delivered better results and it was MUCH faster.
Recently we have seen more evidence of Google’s need for speed – the release of the ultrafast Chrome browser (and soon Chrome OS), the launching of Google’s own Public DNS and the development of a faster protocol (SPDY) to replace HTTP.
The latest speed obsessed products from Google are those designed to measure web page speed.
Speed Tracer is a Google Chrome extension that helps you identify and fix performance problems in web applications. The extension helps you detect the slowest parts of accessing your website — be it javascript parsing and execution, CSS style recalculation, DOM event handling etc.
A new labs feature of Google Webmaster Tools tracks website performance over time. It uses information collected from individuals who have the Google Toolbar installed in their browser to compare your websites speed to the aggregate speeds collected – Google tells you in what percentile your site ranks.
So what’s my point? With the latest Google speed obsession focusing on individual site performance we can speculate that from now on your Google search rankings will be affected by this factor. Meaning that if you want to rank high you must have a speedy website.
Hi,
I am a web developer myself and website loading time is very important. You only have 7 seconds or so to convince an average visitor to stay on your site. If it loads to slowly, well, goodbye, visitor lost.
Do you know any good page speed analyzer plugins for Firefox? Of course Firebug has a Network tab, but it only shows you how LONG does it take for a particular page element to load and not WHY.