Core Web Solutions Articles

A slow website can often lead to a poor user experience, people don’t like to sit around and wait for overweight web pages to download. If your website is serving up large photos, Flash intros or excessive graphics it can turn off your visitors and even cause you to lose customers. As you probably know this is not the best way to treat the customer and apparently now the search engines have figured this out as well.

As of April 4^th of 2010 Google announced that they are going to start evaluating page speed as part of their search determining algorithm. This means that if your website is optimized in many ways yet your homepage is a 300kb or larger sized download, you will be suffering with your Google search engine rankings. If you are currently ranking on the 4^th page for a desired keyword will cutting your page download speed in half move you up 1 or 2 pages? This remains to be seen. How much emphasis Google will place on this analysis of speed is still somewhat of a mystery.

Monitor Your Page Download Speed

Google offers an area for website owners that is know as the “Webmasters Tools”. In this area you can see many details about your sites ranking and search results on Google. In the webmasters tools areas there is a chart that is used to analyze and show to your websites download speed. If you are want to track the speed of your page downloads this is a great place to go to watch the change week by week. Google often is secretive about how their ranking algorithm. However the fact that they are offering an area to monitor your sites download speed is an indicator that this is an important part of optimizing your site.

According to Google they are evaluating page download speed to create a better user experience. This is understandable yet it does put certain restraints on people who want to display media on their website. If you have a site and you are in a competitive niche will you create a “plain Jane” site that is devoid of pictures and graphics? If you want to be highly competitive you probably will, although how much will this cost you in the end? If your site does not properly convey the right explanation and visual description, this can become a serious threat to customer conversion and profits

What does this mean for you? Reducing page download speed should be something on your mind as you work to optimize your site. It is definitely wise to double think hosting your own videos on the front page and using large image files. Now is the time to be more aware of these things, as the internet is becoming more competitive those who ignore the changes may be left out in the cold. If you are designing a new site these are some things to think about as you plan out your pages.