Google has a new team that is King for now, it is the Making the Web Fast Team headed by engineer Ilya Grigorik. You’ll be hearing a lot about this new team in the days, weeks, and month ahead.
To understand how important this new thrust into page speed is for Google, I recommend watching Ilya’s recent presentation on the topic. The bottom line is that Google is serious about website page speed, and has even come out point blank to say that PageSpeed (a new term coined by Google) is now part of their algorithm used to rack and stack websites in the organic results.
Google is so fixated on speed that they want you to be as well and so as a result has set up a new tool where you can check your own PageSpeed online: http://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/. Using this tool – the PageSpeed Insights Tool, Google will quickly spider your site as well as your mobile site and give you a score as well as tips on how to improve your site speed.
So just how important is PageSpeed to Google?
Well this is what Google says specifically, “Fast and optimized pages lead to higher visitor engagement, retention, and conversions.” That means that Google feels that to keep its own search engine in the number one spot for users the sites that it returns in the organic results had better be FAST!
Okay, how fast is fast?
Google wants speeds of 2,000 milliseconds or less for page load time. If your page loads in about one second or less, Google should be happy with your site. If your site loads in over one second, I would recommend you start looking to drop images, compress image files, enable http caching, and strongly looking at ways to speed up your page load time.
Here are some great resources from Google to help you improve your PageSpeed.
https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/ developer tools provided by Google
https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/service a beta by invitation PageSpeed improvement service
http://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/ pagespeed testing tool
https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/psol page speed optimization libraries