Does page load speed influence search engine ranking?

posted by Jon - 09:02 15/03/10

Google’s site indexing algorithm is possibly going to change in the near future, with the added factor of page load speed.

The idea was first mentioned by Matt Cutts head of Google’s Webspam team.  Below is an interview with Matt at PubCon in Las Vegas.

Over the past couple of months Google have been pushing the notion of a “fast internet”.  They have published a number of articles centred on increasing script performance (PHP and JavaScript) along with a number of other tips including compression, caching and much more.

All of this will help speed up browser rendering time and reduce the amount of data transferred from the website server to the users machine, but with all this in mind don’t neglect to improve server side performance.

Performance of the server is not just about installing bigger and better hardware components but also about optimising server side code whether that be ASP, .NET or PHP.  Along with minimizing database calls and spreading work load process between the web server and database.

Even though the change to the indexing has not been implemented yet, and it is still unclear when it will, it is still beneficial speed up your sites now.  This is because Google only allocates so much time to indexing a website.  If your website server is slow at serving up content and the pages themselves are fit to burst with content the Google Bot may only analyse a portion of your site because they took so long to download and process.