Google Now Using Speed as a Ranking Factor
Matt Cutts announced on this on his blog Friday, and you can also read more at the Google Webmaster blog… Google now uses your websites Speed as a metric in how its ranked in search results… In other words, speed up your site, or we won’t send you traffic!
While Google says that this change affects less than 1% of the websites “It’s customers visit”, that’s quite a lot!
One other interesting thing this new “Speed Metric for Google” brings up, is that you MUST subscribe to Webmaster Tools in order to have any visibility to what Google thinks of your site.
It is what is it is folks…
Update: I have spent the last 30-60 minutes looking at various sites and seeing WHY they are failing to meet the speed metric by big G.
Test your site at: Pingdon Speed Test, and it will return a list of EVERY file being accessed and served by your site, including those causing the speed bottleneck.
As I optimize a few sites, I will update a new post on ways to speed up a site.
The Speed Target
That bold red line that separates good from bad, follows all other trends in the Google algo… and they don’t tell you exactly what it is!
In other words… your PAGE has to have a minimum of at least ________ ms response time, or we will penalize it! Remember this is not only a site penalty, its a page penalty.
Every Site I Own Needs to Be Sped up!
I added several sites to GWT over the last month when I first heard this was coming around… EVERY site, across 4 different servers, needs to be optimized!
On one newer site, which is very slim… GWT says:
Performance overview
On average, pages in your site take 2.9 seconds to load (updated on April 6, 2010). This is faster than 58% of sites.
However, my site is still in the pink/red zone of the chart and needs to be further optimized!
….
Google Caffeine Update has NOT YET Rolled out!
Search engine land had an interesting read on this speed thing – but the last sentence of the article says something I thought occurred LONG AGO… the Google Caffeine Update
One last note: Google says this ranking change has no relation to its upcoming Caffeine rollout, which is about how Google indexes the web, not how it ranks pages.
How do your sites make out in the Google speed test?
Next… I am going to post ways you can optimize your site to load faster, and we can all try to hit the magic bullet of _____ ms load time! I assume its below 2 milliseconds.
Previously Published Articles You May Like to Read:
- Google Makes Caffeine Official
- Google Caffeine Update in Full Swing?
- Google Update in Full Swing – Quick Update
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I have been doing my part to "Build the Internet" since 1994, when I built my first website! Since then, I have built hundreds of niche websites for myself and many others, focused on design, applications, ecommerce, search optimization and internet marketing.
Mark,
This is a rather timely post, as just yesterday I was introduced to ezgz plugin to do exactly what you are talking about (speeding up load time for sites). I’ve done some research regarding gzipping of WordPress sites, and it seems that this feature used to come standard, but was disabled because some browsers had trouble viewing sites that use gzip compression.
It seems that most Internet users have upgraded their browsers to ones that can now handles gzip compression.
Do you know of any reason why we shouldn’t install and enable the ezgz plugin to our WP sites?
Rochelle
@Rochelle – I don’t Rochelle… as a matter of fact, I will include it in my testing this morning.
I use WP Supercache on many sites at the recommendation of Hostgator. I am going to tet several things…
I also have a semi-homebrewed solution I use on a few sites, but its very tech-heavy and not a point and click solution.
There is a LOT that goes into the load time. On this site for instance, I just pulled and optimized 2 banners that were fed from their respective sources, and moved them to this server. The page load dropped by 2 full seconds.
The images were +200kb, and +170kb, I was able to reduce them to -25kb each… Its 20 small changes like that, which add up to huge results!
Mark
@Rochelle – On this site, I run WP-SuperCache.
I just now dropped the ezgz plugin in, enabled it, browsed several pages, and reloaded this page several times.
Pageload time went from: 0.676 to 0.486
On a different site… same setup (WPSuperCache already installed, add ezgz)
Pageload time went from: 0.342 to 0.396 (Yes, it increased, weird)
The ezgz is compressing the html, but doing nothing with images, scripts, css files, etc.
Testing…
M
One thing I’ve noticed is that it seems to take, in some cases, a few minutes for the gzipping to take effect. You might want to make sure the gzip is working before you test the speed by visiting http://www.whatsmyip.org/http_compression/
Rochelle
My BANS sites are faster than WP sites. WP sites use Reviewazon. Too many factors go into this speed issue. Wish this would be available in Analytics instead of having to use Webmaster Tools.
This as very interesting ..does this mean the end for blogs ?
I use Xsitepro & Blogs for my niche sites and XSP loads faster than Wpress hands down.
PHP/MySQL will always load slower than static HTML ….. so is this “google theory” correct ?
I just did my own testing. The results were interesting.
I am using http://tools.pingdom.com/ to test the speed of loading time. I tested with nothing, ezgz only, wp-cache only, wp-super-cache 1/2 on with compression, wp-super-cache all on without compression, wp-super-cache all on with compression, and wp-super-cache all on without compression but WITH ezgz enabled. Here are the results:
Nothing to assist with load time
* Home page = 2.4 seconds
* Slowest image = 9.7 seconds
ezgz plugin
* Home page = 2.5 seconds (slightly slower than nothing)
* Slowest image = 9.4 seconds (slightly faster than nothing)
wp-cache
* Home page = 3.1 seconds (slower than nothing)
* Slowest image = 14.4 seconds (much slower than nothing)
wp-super-cache 1/2 on with compression
* Home page = 2.6 seconds (slightly slower than nothing)
* Slowest image = 9.7 seconds (slightly slower than nothing)
wp-super-cache all on without compression
* Home page = 2.6 seconds (slightly slower than nothing)
* Slowest image = 9.7 seconds (slightly slower than nothing)
wp-super-cache all on with compression
* Home page = 2.5 seconds (slightly slower than nothing)
* Slowest image = 9.5 seconds (slightly slower than nothing)
wp-super-cache all on without compression but WITH ezgz enabled
* Home page = 1.0 seconds (much faster than any other combination)
* Slowest image = 9.5 seconds (slightly slower than nothing)
So, for this particular site, it appears that wp-super-cache 100% on AND ezgz are the winners. But, I’m not sure there’s much I can do for the images. I am using several plugins that automatically post images (ReviewAzon, photodropper, etc.) and I have very little control over what I get. Any advice on how to speed up images for sites such as mine?
Rochelle
@Rochelle – Thanks Rochelle. I use both YSlow for Firefox and the Page Speed tool for Firebug as well, which also show what is and is not being cached.
@Roy T – WordPress or blogs dont have to be slow… You can make WP pretty fact actually!
@Sean – I agree… some of the plugin makers are REALLY going to step up to speed up their code.
I think the KEY thing in whats being said is that it only effects 1% of the web, and if you are the best resource for the query, it won’t make a difference.
Most spammy type sites are on overloaded shared hosting, that automatically comes with a tax due to its nature. So this may in fact be another method of algorithmically (sic) trying to eliminate spam?
I also want to add… Load time is much more than just YOUR site, the server plays a BIG ROLE!
I have a few dedicated servers with Hostgator along with a reseller plan and several baby croc plans, so I have seen the differences.
On one of the dedi’s… there are only 2 websites, a live and a beta ecommerce setup. When the beta site was fully operational, it was taking 7-9 seconds for the initial home page to load…
After talking to HG support, they had errors in the DNS settings for the nameserver on THIER system, that was causing the names to resolve incorrectly.
After they fixed the DNS issue, it went from 7-9 seconds to under 1 second load time! So…DNS can also be an issue!
@Mark Hansen – @ Mark Hansen But if you need to “work” at making blogs load as fast as ststic html – ie XSP sites – what is the benefit of a Blog ?
My understanding of niche site “millions” is to get them out fast and spend time on promoting them ?
My gut feeling is that Blogs as niche sites are over promoted and the “down side” of them far outways any benefit…. true there are many plug ins to automate stuff ..but has that been over done and Google sees through the intended – lazy mans – smoke screen ?
I think before everyone runs off and starts installing plugins, that they at least read Matt Cutts post. The second paragraph says:
“Don’t Panic”
He goes on to say that site speed carries far less weight than other factors. So while site speed is something we want to increase, you do want to consider what it looks like to the reader. Compressing a site seems to cause a pause before the reader sees anything on the page (at least on slower connections). Google might like you better, but your reader might not.
@Roy T – I cannot disagree Roy. Google may expect MUCH more from a Blog” or WordPress site, than just a few landing pages with affiliate links.
@Brian – In my opinion, yes and no Brian. I never used to use the SuperCache plugin on this site until I had post dugg by some influential people, and HG shut the site down due to the load on the server.
At that time, I installed the plugin and never looked back again!
I think this is a GREAT time to look at your sites and do EVERYTHING you can to get them below the -1 second load time, preferably lower!
I just looked at yours for instance and the homepage took: 5.610 seconds to load. (Viw your source code, arthemia has a timer built in that shows the speed in the source code of the footer)
< -- 52 queries. 5.610 seconds. -->
There is never a bad time to try to speed things up IMHO.
Mark
I agree that it’s never a bad time, but I just don’t want to see people panic. Some people might read what you’ve said, and say “Oh my God! My site is going to get indexed because it’s too slow!” You didn’t say that, of course, but what people read, and what they interpret can be two different things.
Anyway, thanks taking the time to check mine. Should have seen it before I made some changes last month. R-e-a-l-l-y s-l-o-w….. Off to test this ezgz plug-in. It doesn’t appear in the WordPress.org plug-in directory, so it doesn’t have that “approved” look to it, but heck, I’ll give it a go!
Hi Mark,
After your testing can you also tell us maybe how we can speed up a Bans store?
I’m sure a few of us have stores we are hanging on to.
@Randy @ Morgan Silver Dollars – For BANS or non-wordpress sites, just drop in SmartOptimizer… it ROCKS for speeding up non-wordpress sites!
http://farhadi.ir/works/smartoptimizer
It “works” with WordPress, but some of your things in admin will start working all jinky.
Mark
I feel there may be a bit of a conflict here between user experience and speed of loading. Agreed, faster page loading is a desirable target, but does this mean we should all go back to basic html and no images? Impossible for me with a wordpress-based travel content site with lots of images.
We all know that by coding in a certain way our users can get into our page way before the page itself is completely loaded. But if we’re running ads and other externally supplied content (sharethis, for example) this can really affect the total time our page takes to finish loading. Similarly, there’s a limit to compressing images. Should we all be switching to CDNs?
I use w3 total cache for wordpress, but even so there’s no way I’m going to get a total page load down to 2 seconds; currently GWT shows a 5.7 average. Although I’m on a high volume shared server at Pair, the obvious answer is to spring for a dedicated server, but to be honest that’s simply too expensive for me at the moment.
So although keeping a weather eye on page speed, I’m concentrating on providing the best experience I can for users by trying to show them the most important (to them) elements of the page ASAP and hope that’s enough (for them if not Google). The advantages of using wordpress as opposed to static html are too great to consider going back to a templated static site. Not the least of which is the easier repurposing of our content for the mobile etc market.
Tony
Trying to speed up my sites as we speak. The images are what kills my load time. Like Rachelle said, what can we do if we pull in images from other places? Is there a way to cache them on our server?
I just checked. Has any one used Hot Linked Image Cacher?
@Terry – You can always check into “Smushit”, which is a wordpress image compression plugin.
I find that compressing them locally is better for me… but I have software that does it. (I use FireWorks, but Photoshop does it as well)
You can also check free tools like Free Image Optimizer to do them one at a time.
M
[...] blog in particular and I will be looking for ways and methods to optimize their loading time. Mark at the Niche Store Builder is also doing the same and will be posting his progress over on his [...]
[...] think we can all agree that regardless of the fact Google using speed as a ranking factor, it will help us to learn how to speed up our [...]
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