Fast sites get better search engine ranking
Late 2009, Matt Cutts from Google, made a speech were he said that Google might start using page speed as a factor when ranking search results, meaning that a faster web page would get a higher Google ranking than a slower one. Google were then already using landing page speed as a component when calculating Adwords quality scores, and from there the step was probably not so great to start using it when presenting search results also.
On friday, the Google webmaster blog announced that Google is now actively "using site speed in web search ranking". The fact that the world's most popular search engine thinks web site performance is a key factor to user satisfaction means a lot of people who previously were not too bothered with performance are now likely to start scrambling to improve the performance of their sites. We are of course only too happy about this, as web site speed - testing and optimization - is what we are all about.
In practise, this means that a fast webpage will now get a higher search ranking than a slow one. Or, more accurately, a fast webpage will be slightly favoured by Google in the comparison with a slower webpage. There are of course a whole range of other factors used when computing the ranking of a page.
As a web site owner or developer, it is going to be ever more important to keep your site and your pages fast and responsive. There have been several reports about how slow sites will cause you to lose business. If your web service is slow, your users are likely to abandon you for a competitor whose service is faster and more responsive. When industry players like Google also openly start favouring speed it is a clear message that now speed is everybody's concern.
What to do? Well, if you're a web developer you should start thinking about performance when writing code. This is not something you can do as an afterthought (or you can, but it will take a tremenduous amount of extra time) - it has to be part of your creative process.
The trick isn't to write code that performs well when you test it by yourself. The trick is to write code that scales - code that performs well when there are 10, 50 or 100 people accessing your site at the same time. Many developers aren't very good at this, because it requires a different mindset than just writing code "that works". Instead of just thinking "will this work?" you have to start thinking "will this work with 1,000 users on the site?".
It doesn't have to look like this. A software that scales well
is like a road that gets wider when traffic increases.
Both as a web developer and a site owner you will want to test your web pages to see that they perform well and that they scale well. There are various tools, techniques and methods you can use. In the upcoming weeks we will be writing a couple of articles on how to improve performance of your site, aimed both at developers and site owners. Keep an eye on this space.
