Mwahahahahaha. See. I TOLD YOU ALL that site performance mattered in SEO. Did you listen? Nooooooooo. Well suck on this:
Google just announced a new site performance report in their Webmaster Tools control panel. With it, you get a nifty overview of your site’s load speed:
You can find the new tool under the ‘Labs’ menu in Google Webmaster Tools.
The new tool even makes suggestions regarding load speed improvements:
And, not without a sense of irony, Google points out that their own Google Analytics javascript is a problem:
Site speed matters, ok?
If Google’s putting it in Webmaster Tools, it matters.
Stop arguing. Stop digging in your stubborn-assed heels and telling me that it’s OK your site takes 10 seconds to load, because your competitors’ load in the same amount of time, so who cares? Set up Google Webmaster Tools, install Google Page Speed and YSlow, and start speeding up your damned site.
End of rant.
Toodles.
Related rants
- The developer’s guide to SEO
- Oh, and follow me on Twitter, so I can yell and scream some more.
You might want to use your own advice.
10 seconds isn’t alright, but 7.1 is?
@Thomas unfortunately I have these things called ‘clients’ who pay for stuff like ‘food’ and ‘shelter’. They get first dibs on site performance work. Whenever they actually take my advice…
It loaded on 3 seconds on my end. 🙂
Well, as you know, this is on my long list of things to help optimize my site. I was scared to death to click on “Site Performance”, but I was somewhat pleased to find that my site loaded in 2.0 seconds! Faster than 67% of sites.
You can imagine my amazement, because I haven’t gotten to that portion of your advisement yet. I still have a ton of images to adjust and basic house cleaning of my site.
I’m going to keep a close eye on this in the future.
Thanks again Ian for the heads up and almost eerily accurate predictions regarding the enigma that is the Google.
Fair enough 🙂
And thanks for the solid advice in your “The Developer’s Guide to Internet Marketing” post.
I wonder if on top of performance, Google is also looking at standards compliant CSS and XTHML… Might be worth investigating.
@Greg since I’m batting .500 so far this year, I’ll say that they already do. Code cleanliness is a factor. XHTML/CSS is generally leaner and cleaner. Plus it should load faster, too. So why not?
Ian, what speed would you say is good? Would you say 3.5 seconds is a good overall speed for a website to load? Or does it have to be in milliseconds of something?
@Savvas As fast as possible is good 🙂 – there’s no rule of thumb. But certainly if you’re loading at 3.5 seconds now, 3 seconds would be better.
I also noticed the webmaster tool complaining about the tracking code on our sites.
Google Analytics just released their faster tracking code, maybe thats what the “irony” really means.
I don’t see the tie in to getting better rankings because your pages load faster. Only one sentence in your post:
“If Google’s putting it in Webmaster Tools, it matters.”
Awfully big assumption there. Since it is WEBMASTER TOOLS that you are using, it’s just a tool to help you reduce/optimize your page load times.
Does it help you get better rankings ? The author says yes, I say: there is nothing that would indicate that. Again, not saying that speeding up your site isn’t a good idea, it is – but does it help SEO ? Ya….. no.
Clarkson, if I was to design a search engine and I found a couple of sites that were bringing my server down because their pages took 10 extra seconds to load, I wouldn’t be crawling them as often as other sites. Therefore, I wouldn’t be able to give them as high a rank as if I could crawl them.