Improve your Google Rankings: Speed up your website

Posted on Saturday, April 10th, 2010 at 12:23 pm.

Google has announced that the speed of your website is now included in their search ranking algorithm.

The Official Google Webmaster Central blog confirms it is using a new signal, site speed, which is the speed at which your website responds to requests. Google is using a number of  sources to determine how fast your site is relative to other sites.

This algorithm change only applies to google.com at the moment, and for searches in English. No doubt it will be coming to google.co.uk at some point.

Whilst this is a new contributing signal for Google, it is relevance that remains the primary ranking factor, and indeed fewer than 1% of sites’ rankings are influenced by the site speed issues.

Your Google Webmaster Tools provides an overview of your site performance in the Labs menu choice, and gives a visual overview together with a set of recommendations as to how you can speed things up:

If you’re feeling geeky, here are some tools you might want to try, but they reallly are for the developers amongst you:

• Page Speed is a Firefox plugin that gives a Page Speed Score detailed technical recommendations for speeding things up
• YSlow, another Firefox plugin, this time from Yahoo!
• WebPagetest is an online service with detailed recommendations