Google recently announced that the speed with which a page loads has become an increasingly important factor in determining that page’s rank.
From Google’s official webmaster blog:
We encourage you to start looking at your site’s speed (the tools above provide a great starting point) — not only to improve your ranking in search engines, but also to improve everyone’s experience on the Internet.
Worried that your site isn’t quite as zippy-fast as it should be? There are a wide range of things we can do to improve the situation:
- Optimize your photos – smaller file sizes mean faster load times
- Avoid “widget creep.” Every add-on to your site that pulls information from an external server (Facebook and Twitter widgets, badges, etc.) adds to your load time.
- Streamline your site’s code – are you calling 14 different CSS files when you really only need one?
And that’s just the beginning.
For some tools you can use to check out your site’s performance, visit: http://code.google.com/speed. If you need some help speeding up your site, contact me for a free estimate.