Google Says Website Page Load Speed is Key

This past month Google has been talking about website page load speed. They have been chatting up the topic in forums and have even recommended a Firefox browser plugin that runs a website speed clocker that provides recommendations for improvement.

The chatter in the forums and blogs is that Google is going to be considering page load speed as one part of their organic algorithm. Remember however that there are about 100 factors that Google considers for organic placement so although this may be an important one, it is not the one that will make or break your website’s organic placement.

My recommendation is that if you are redesigning your website this year a snappy page load should be a design consideration. If you have an existing website, do what you can to improve page load time, but don’t get so spun up that it becomes your only concern.

For existing websites, there are many important factors that you can still very easily control now such as content freshness, authority of your content, readability, search friendly navigation, good site architecture and cross linking between pages that will help you right now even without tweaking your page load speed.