It’s been covered a lot for quite some time, but site speed has now officially become one of the factors of Google’s algorithm. The idea is that google wants to provide users with the best experience possible, and the speed at which a website loads is one of the things that influences this. In order to keep users happy, Google will use the speed at which a website loads to determine it’s position in the search engine results.

This doesn’t mean that site speed will be a major factor in where a website ranks. It’s well known that Google’s algorithm contains over 200 different factors, with differing importance on each. What this means is that if two pages were to match up exactly on all the other factors, the quicker one would generally rank higher. The importance of site speed in the algorithm has not been revealed but it is certainly something to consider if you want your website to be as optimised as possible.

Thankfully there are a lot of tools out there that can make diagnosing any issues with site speed that much easier. If you want to learn a bit more about how to improve your site speed you can check out this post on site speed at Weboptimist.