How long are you prepared to wait for a website to load until you get impatient and click away? One second? Two? Google recently carried out an experiment where they intentionally decreased the speed of their own website from 100 milliseconds to 400 milliseconds. The results showed decreases in the average number of Google searches from 0.2% to 0.6%.  Users were turning their backs on Google as the time taken for search results to appear was too long. Even after Google returned their site to the original speed they found that searches continued to decline for the next five weeks!

It is because of this dramatic affect that speed has on user’s experience of a website, that Google has announced faster websites will be ranked higher. This is the first time that Google has officially announced that Speed does have a direct effect on Rankings. SEO guru’s have suspected this for a while and a fast website is always desired for usability reasons, but Google’s announcement has put any debate over this issue to rest.

Google uses its Googlebots to test how long a page takes to respond as well as Google toolbar to test page load times. Generate UK have invested a lot of time and money into our server capabilities. This means that the sites that we host on our server have quick and smooth load times. As demonstrated by the Google experiment speed not only judges your Google ranking but that the amount of users actually decreases with a slow website. This in turn will also have an effect on your conversion rate. With a slow running website traffic is less likely to stick around and ultimately not buy into your services or products.

A lot of people are concerned that this change will really only benefit larger organisations as they can afford to pay more for hosting. I believe this is a misconception. Small sites can often react and respond faster than larger corporations can to changes on the web.  Making small changes on a larger website can often be a slow process due to internal bureaucracy; whereas smaller sites can often make those small changes to help increase the speed of their website.

Currently less than 1% of search queries are effect by site speed according to Google. However Google have already released a list of tools to help test your sites speed. This could only be the beginning for the importance of site speed. Google’s passion for fast internet and dedication to releasing new tools demonstrates that this could be an extremely important signal for the future. Google have been using speed as a signal for several weeks now and there has been no dramatic change. But this simply could be the beginning of a bigger campaign for faster websites.

Generate UK has invested in a high performance server infrastructure for customers websites we host. We ensure that our server is fast, efficient and reliable. Google says that a 0.5 second delay in the page load speed of your website can reduce traffic by 20%. As a business can you afford to lose this amount of traffic? Generate UK servers deliver up to 35% more speed over traditional hardware, this is to ensure that your website does not suffer because of server speed restrictions.

On page content can also affect the speed of your website. Having a large number of images, flash files or Javascript can increase the time your page takes to load. There are tools that you can use to run reports on your websites speed which will tell you exactly how long each page takes to load as well as identifying areas that are slowing you website down. Follow this link to see which tools Google suggest you use. Alternatively there are other sites you can use such as websiteoptimisation.com.

It is important to remember that this is only one aspect or signal of SEO. Along with speed we still have to take into account on page and off page SEO. These are all areas of search engine optimisation that Generate UK specialises in. If you would like to get your website ranking higher in Google then why not talk to one of our SEO consultants. We can help advise you on areas of your site that may need improvement to benefit from higher rankings.