Google Webmaster Tools - New Feature Page Speed

[QVA - Emma]

Hi all,

I don't know if you've heard but page speed is going to be more of a ranking factor in Google in 2010.

There's a great snippet about it at the Search Engine Roundtable

Interested to know your thoughts - as with all things Google - how much of a ranking factor will it be and accuracy?

You can install page speed on your firefox browser which will give you an insight on how you can improve on download times etc (which I haven't tinkered with yet!plus you need to install firebug to use it)

In your webmaster tools profile - click on your site and click the labs button on the left hand navigation - your options are Fetch as Googlebot (another useful tool - you can see exactly how Google sees your web page) Malware details (check for malware on your site) and Site Performance. Click on Site performance and away you go. These are still in experimental mode but useful none the less.

Enjoy

Emma

 

[FLAUK]

Thanks for the heads-up - I hadn't seen this before. My sites have the following average page load speeds:

2.3
1.6
2.0
0.3

Would be interested how others compare.

Wonder if this means graphic heavy sites are going to be at a disadvantage?

 

[DoLally]

I read the same thing Emma - it is all part of the Google Caffeine project.

Server speed is something we have always considered anyway so (hopefully) nothing new

*waits for all customer pages to fall off the first page of Google next January

 

[Zeal]

It may well factor in new results... but imo - I don't feel it's going to make a massive different at all.

I know they are introducing over 100? other factors... so maybe - everything combined will have an effect... but not just page speed alone. (my thoughts anyway!)

 

Thanks for the heads up Emma.

Looks like we have some work to do on some sites.:|

Earl

 

[fisicx]

No so sure it's absolute page speed. I small static page is always going to load faster than a large ecommerce category page or gallery.

I very much suspect it's more to do with relative speeds - how fast your page loads compared to your competitors.

So if you have poorly structured page with masses of javascript, flash, images and all sorts of background stuff going on then you may well lose out to a well coded page with a logical structure and the minimum of scripting.

Hopefully this will weed out all the junk homemade sites using freebie scripts.

 

So if you have poorly structured page with masses of javascript, flash, images and all sorts of background stuff going on then you may well lose out to a well coded page with a logical structure and the minimum of scripting.

sounds like a well known car lease site I know.

Earl

 

[QVA - Emma]

Thanks for comments guys - been having a tinker - very interesting, especially the hints on how to make the pages faster. Particularly smug about 2 sites that are faster than 93% of sites just the rest to worry about lol!

Got you all a link to install the page speed tool - i'm too good to you! Checkout the closure compiler too, to minify (is that even a word?!) JavaScript files automatically.

Emma

 

[fisicx]

Good stuff Emma. Might be worth clearing your cache and running the test again so make sure it's a clean load.

I got a load time of 2.64 seconds with one tool, 0.86 with another and 0.48 with a third so I'm not going to worry too much about the my ranking just jet.

 

The darling of ecommerce is magento at present , partly because of seo - great product it is too , particularly now the inbuilt blog has been solved more easily, but i wonder how that community will react because it is slow by any standards

 

[deadgoodundies]

Im not sure how useful this is - it's showing some of my pages are taking 11 seconds to load (what are they comparing it against a 56k Modem?) - even on my bad less than 1mb office connection it takes less than a second (even with the cache cleared)

 

[QVA - Emma]

Im not sure how useful this is - it's showing some of my pages are taking 11 seconds to load (what are they comparing it against a 56k Modem?) - even on my bad less than 1mb office connection it takes less than a second (even with the cache cleared)

My home connection isn't very fast either but it took at least 6 seconds to load your site - I ran the page speed for firefox and it came up with some suggestions on how to minify it - can send you the file if you like just PM me your email.

Thanks

Emma

 

[digitali]

I hadn't tried this out until I saw this thread, thanks Emma.

After checking a few of my sites the results confirm that I really need to be looking for a dedicated server rather than shared hosting.

Another interesting thing about the results is that they are taken from pages across the whole site and not just the home page.