You may have the most beautifully designed online storefront in the e-commerce universe, with a stunning array of desirable products – but if your website stalls when it loads, leaving shoppers tapping their fingers in frustration, the rest of the …

Google announced today that it has added a new site speed report to Google Analytics, called User Timings. The report lets users track custom timings, and shows the execution speed or load time of any hit, event or user interaction. …

We recently talked about reducing HTTP requests. Here’s a quick recap: Slow web pages impede your website’s goals; 90% of a typical web page’s slowness happens after the HTML has been downloaded; Reducing the number of HTTP requests triggered by …

Google’s head of web spam, Matt Cutts put out a new video discussing site speed’s impact on rankings. This is not the first time Cutts has addressed the issue, but it’s a somewhat different take than we’ve seen before, as …

If your website consistently loads in under two seconds, congratulations!  It is in the small minority of sites able to meet the new threshold for patience among Internet users. But if yours is like the vast majority of websites that …

Google announced today that it has released a new Site Speed report, with “all the key metrics” in an easy-to-read Overview report. “The Overview report provides an at-a-glance view of essential information for measuring your site’s page loading metrics: Avg. …

Google announced the launch of some new metrics for the Site Speed report in Google Analytics. The metrics are aimed at giving webmaster a better understanding of how they can improve their website performance. Speed, we know, is a ranking …

It’s become clear that site speed and performance have become increasingly important on the web, particularly with Google. The company has made a plethora of announcements over the past year or two directly related to making the web faster in general. Most recently, for example, Google announced mod_pagespeed, a tool for webmasters to use to automatically optimize their sties. "It’s like Page Speed, but makes the changes automatically," Google told WebProNews.

Website owners and bloggers, take heed: you don’t need to stop whatever you’re doing and eliminate all tools, videos, and pictures from your properties.  But as soon as it’s convenient, you may want to (re)check how quickly things load, because Google announced this afternoon that it’s begun to factor site speed into its search rankings.

About a month ago, WebProNews interviewed Google’s Matt Cutts, who suggested that page speed may soon become a ranking factor in the world’s most popular search engine. Speed has been a consistent theme with the company over the past year or so, with the release of various tools and announcements. It has become quite evident that Google places a great deal of importance on speeding up the web. With that in mind, it’s not hard to see why Cutts’ suggestion could soon become a reality.

Over the course of 2009, a consistent theme that Google has been involved with is that of speed. In announcement after announcement, Google has talked about the importance of speed on the web, and how the company wants to do everything it can to make the web a faster place. Has it occurred to you that how fast your page loads may have a direct effect on how your site ranks in Google?