Google on Page Speed in 2010
October 16, 2010
It was almost two years ago that Google announced that page loading time would be affecting ad quality score for Pay-per-Click ads. In April of 2008 the Internet giant claimed that the reason for this was for users to gain improved experiences with the Internet while Google serves up faster content on the Web. To assist webmasters with their efforts to increase those page loading times, Google has released a resource that is full of tools, helpful articles, discussions and suggestions about improving website performance. Search engine optimization professionals, among others, are now wondering just how important loading time and site speed will become with factoring rankings in Google’s algorithm.
With Google already providing tools to analyze and improve pages, many people over at Google think the Internet should be fast and that the speed of pages loading is critical to users having a positive experience. Many thoughts turn to the idea that before too long, Google will start testing site performance to influence their search results. In addition, although it will eventually become a significant factor it will start out slowly and have little impact on rankings- at first. Users have little patience today for slow loads and pages, and with the demand for real-time content increasing Google is stressing the importance of load time. Websites need to cater to the needs of Internet users by serving that content efficiently, cleanly and quickly. From a client’s point of view, the speed of a page is exemplary of quality and performance of the website that it belongs to, which is measured by the time that lapses between the moment a new page is requested and the moment that the page is fully loaded.
A new tool launched by Google within Google Webmaster Tools allows webmasters to witness their site’s load times and performances. Websmasters will see the number of DNS lookups and the server requests that are made when those pages load. Not only will you be able to find out how many seconds each page within your website takes to load, but you will also be able to experience suggestions, solutions and comments about why pages are loading slower than they should be and also how to fix it. Some of the best topics hit important aspects of page loading times, including transmitting HTTP requests, downloading resources, setting up TCP connections, rendering objects on those pages, parsing and executing scripts and fetching resources from the cache, among others.