The guys there had speed at about 10%, relevance at 30% and CTR at 60% *for Adwords placement* – so I’m starting to think that there’s something to the speed issue, but not very much. They mentioned other things, such as how much time people spend on your page, in your site; how easy the site is to navigate, etc. My main site (http://www.fertilitystories.com) is fairly slow, but it gets loads of organic search, so I’m trying not to worry myself about speed too much (since I have no budget to completely redo the site at this point).

Google should grade a website with load speed as a factor and one way or another, they always have. If a page is heavily loaded with large graphics files, it can take a long time to load and I certainly will not stick around for that big event. When folks don’t wait for a page to load, it will show up in statistics. Google will take note and rank accordingly.

Page Speed may not have been important in the past, but we didn’t have smart phones and PADS (or whatever) in the past. Download speed has a new relevance these days. It’s a new ball game. I find it very hard to believe Google aren’t well aware of this and that’s why they’re pushing Page Speed. Suggesting that it isn’t a ranking factor is probably the usual Google disinformation.

BB

speed is obviously a crucial factor but Relevency is a must, To be fair ; speed shouldnt be a ranking factor

Dear Matt,

If an improvement falls in the forest and no one is around, does it make a sound? Obviously yes. If you have to explain an improvement, it is not an improvement. What’s it like to be the God of search?

I would like to comment that if you make your site’s pages, especially the home page (where load time is the most important factor when clicking the link from a search engine) W3C compliant, or in other words “green” your site so that it’s fuly disabled accessible – you will decrease your site’s home page’s and each page that is now green’s load time. Before I made my home page W3C compliant, site load time was about three-five seconds. Now it’s down to less than one second. I made each of my site pages green and the load time is down to less than a second for each page. As long as Google considers site load time in its page ranking, this is very important. You can green your site by working on the code using the W3C guidelines and other sites on the Web, or you can hire someone to correct your site code. I would suggest doing the latter unless you know some code, but the W3C compliance site will give you point by point guidelines that you can use to correct your site. I would suggest also bringing all of the code on your site, especially your home page (loading page) to current standards while you’re at it, as this decreases site load time overall. Correct all of the code on your page that is old, eliminate unused styles and excess code that you don’t need, and you will decrease site load time and increase load speed.

I agree with Matt Cutts, relevancy should always be the #1 ranking factor – after all it wouldn’t do Google any favors to not return relevant search results, their business is dependent on relevancy – right? But he didn’t answer the question of ranking weight being given to page load speed. Like the poster above I’m begining to think speed has a factor of about 10%, just from my own experience.

I spent time researching page load speed last year for the company I work for – we have a large ecommerce site, a corporate site and an intranet – our business is very competitive so we really have to be hyper aware of any benefits we can take advantage of. We ended up getting a website accelerator (Aptimze) and its been excellent. Lets not forget that it benefits Google for us to have faster sites, e.g.. people view more pages if they load faster therefore are more likely to click on advertising e.g. Adsense So Google are incentivised to make speed matter, I think Caffeine is the start of making it matter.

There’s lots of research and case studies out there demonstrating increased page speed results in increased page views, increases in revenue, reduction in hardware costs, increases in search engine traffic. Do a search for Gomez, Akamai – Shopzilla have also spoken publicly on how inceasing the speed of their site has inceased their business, they have influenced many eC sites to think about speed.