Every time we release a new version of our website content management software there is a performance improvement – meaning that websites run faster. We get really (really) excited about faster websites, and love to tell our clients about how their website will now run faster than ever before. Our clients are receptive, but don't usually share the same level of enthusiasm.
We understand – it's hard to tell the difference between a web page that loads in 0.7 seconds and one that loads in 0.4 seconds. Clients can't see the difference in many cases, and it's not easy to get excited about something you can barely notice. Still, there really are good reasons for marketing folks to get excited about faster websites.
Faster websites:
- Retain visitors for longer periods of time
- Increase the number of page views per visitor, and on the website as a whole
- Provide better, more satisfying experiences for the visitor
But now there entirely new, very good reason to care about faster websites — because Google cares.
Google announced earlier this month that it has started using website speed in search ranking. This means that faster websites may have an advantage over slower websites in attaining top positions in Google search results.
From the Google Webmaster Central Blog:
You may have heard that here at Google we're obsessed with speed, in our products and on the web. As part of that effort, today we're including a new signal in our search ranking algorithms: site speed. Site speed reflects how quickly a website responds to web requests.
Speeding up websites is important — not just to site owners, but to all Internet users. Faster sites create happy users and we've seen in our internal studies that when a site responds slowly, visitors spend less time there. But faster sites don't just improve user experience; recent data shows that improving site speed also reduces operating costs. Like us, our users place a lot of value in speed — that's why we've decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings.
The change to Google is not likely to have a major impact on search results initially, but is expected to become increasingly important over time now that Google has implemented the change.
Should you be concerned? Yes, especially if any of the following are true…
- Your website is a few years old
- You use content management software, but have not upgraded to the most recent version
- You use a low-cost, off-the-shelf content management system
- You don't know what you use – someone else takes care of it
- When you use your website it seems slow (if it seems slow then it probably really is slow)