The new site speed criterion isn’t weighted as heavily as something like page relevance, however. Google says less than 1% of actual search queries performed are being affected by the site speed dimension in the current implementation.
Speeding up websites is important — not just to site owners, but to all Internet users. But faster sites don't just improve user experience; recent data shows that improving site speed also reduces operating costs.
Here are some free tools that you can use to evaluate the speed of your site
- Page Speed, an open source Firefox/Firebug add-on that evaluates the performance of web pages and gives suggestions for improvement.
- YSlow, a free tool from Yahoo! that suggests ways to improve website speed.
- WebPagetest shows a waterfall view of your pages' load performance plus an optimization checklist.
- In Webmaster Tools, Labs > Site Performance shows the speed of your website as experienced by users around the world as in the chart below. We've also blogged about site performance.
Do you think web site performance should affect search result rankings?
