We discussed website load speed back on September 17, 2009 in the blog post Website ? and how important it is to a visitor’s overall experience. Although a bit extreme, the statistic I cited in that post was that ” . . . Google has found that as little as a millisecond in load time for their pages can be the difference of millions of incremental dollars.”
In an effort to continue to evolve best practices, Google is adding load speed to their SEO algorithm. January 2010 is the rumored start for this additional factor making the optimization of page loading more important than ever.
I like this change by Google to the algorithm. On the one hand, it will make for more page-loading efficient sites resulting in a better visitor experience and retention — on the other hand, it will lower the use of bandwidth and possibly hosting fees. As the larger companies/websites become more load efficient our expectations will shift and we’ll expect the same performance from both big and small.
A free tool that we use at PhotoOne is WebSiteOptimization. It is setup to allow you to enter your sites URL and submit for diagnosis. As outlined on the bottom of their Homepage, the website speed test will “ . . . help you find out if slow pages are hurting your business. It will test page size, composition, download speed and point out some of the things that need to be done to increase your on-line competitiveness.”
For all of us who hate waiting in lines(*), go ahead and check out WebSiteOptimization. If you haven’t had your site tuned-up in a couple of years, it might be a good New Year’s resolution.
(*) fun fact: during your lifetime you will have spent roughly 5 years in a line.
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I’ve heard rumors about Google introducing this as a ranking factor in January, too. Thanks for passing along the link to the speed test. I got all green’s for my recommendations, so hopefully I’ll starting ranking a little higher. I guess it all depends on how fast the competitor’s sites load, and who knows what other changes will be coming out in January’s algorithm update.
I think this is pretty important for the photography community to take notice. A lot of the photography sites are loaded with images, flash and music — all of which chew up bandwidth and slow down load speed. I think it is important to find the right balance between the virtual resume and user experience.