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Friday, April 09, 2010
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. We use a variety of sources to determine the speed of a site
relative to other sites.
If you are a site owner, webmaster or a web author, here are some tools that you can use to
evaluate the speed of your site:
Page Speed, an open
source Firefox/Firebug add-on that evaluates the performance of web pages and gives suggestions
for improvement.
YSlow, a tool from Yahoo!
that suggests ways to improve website speed.
WebPagetest
shows a waterfall view of your pages' load performance plus an optimization checklist.
In
Webmaster Tools,
Labs > Site Performance shows the speed of your website as experienced by users around the
world as in the chart below. We've also blogged about
site performance.
While site speed is a new signal, it doesn't carry as much weight as the
relevance of a page.
Currently, fewer than 1% of search queries are affected by the site speed signal in our
implementation and the signal for site speed only applies for visitors searching in English on
Google.com at this point. We launched this change a few weeks back after rigorous testing. If you
haven't seen much change to your site rankings, then this site speed change possibly did not
impact your site.
We encourage you to start looking at your site's speed (the tools above provide a great starting
point)—not only to improve your ranking in search engines, but also to improve everyone's
experience on the Internet.
Posted by Amit Singhal, Google Fellow and Matt Cutts, Principal Engineer, Google Search Quality
Team
[[["Easy to understand","easyToUnderstand","thumb-up"],["Solved my problem","solvedMyProblem","thumb-up"],["Other","otherUp","thumb-up"]],[["Missing the information I need","missingTheInformationINeed","thumb-down"],["Too complicated / too many steps","tooComplicatedTooManySteps","thumb-down"],["Out of date","outOfDate","thumb-down"],["Samples / code issue","samplesCodeIssue","thumb-down"],["Other","otherDown","thumb-down"]],[],[[["\u003cp\u003eGoogle is now using site speed as a signal in its search ranking algorithms to enhance user experience and reflect how quickly a website responds.\u003c/p\u003e\n"],["\u003cp\u003eFaster websites lead to happier users and reduced operating costs, as users value speed and spend less time on slow-loading sites.\u003c/p\u003e\n"],["\u003cp\u003eGoogle provides various tools like Page Speed, YSlow, and WebPagetest for site owners to evaluate and improve their site's speed.\u003c/p\u003e\n"],["\u003cp\u003eWhile site speed is a new ranking signal, it currently impacts less than 1% of search queries and only applies to English searches on Google.com.\u003c/p\u003e\n"],["\u003cp\u003eGoogle encourages website owners to prioritize site speed for better search ranking and overall user experience on the internet.\u003c/p\u003e\n"]]],["Google announced the incorporation of site speed as a new signal in their search ranking algorithms, emphasizing the importance of website speed for user experience and reduced operating costs. They provided several tools for site owners to evaluate and improve their site's speed, including Page Speed, YSlow, WebPagetest, and Webmaster Tools. While site speed is considered in ranking, it is less weighted than page relevance and currently impacts fewer than 1% of search queries, applying only to English searches on Google.com.\n"],null,["# Using site speed in web search ranking\n\nFriday, April 09, 2010\n| It's been a while since we published this blog post. Some of the information may be outdated (for example, some images may be missing, and some links may not work anymore). Check out our [latest blog posts](/search/blog#core-web-vitals-and-page-speedpage-speed) on this topic instead.\n\n\nYou may have heard that here at Google we're obsessed with speed, in\n[our products](https://www.google.com/chrome/intl/en/more/speed)\nand\n[on the web](https://googleblog.blogspot.com/search/label/faster%20web).\nAs part of that effort, today we're including a new signal in our search ranking algorithms: site\nspeed. Site speed reflects how quickly a website responds to web requests.\n\n\nSpeeding up websites is important---not just to site owners, but to all Internet users. Faster\nsites create happy users and we've seen in our\n[internal studies](https://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2009/06/speed-matters)\nthat when a site responds slowly, visitors spend less time there. But faster sites don't just\nimprove user experience; recent data shows that improving site speed also\n[reduces operating costs](https://radar.oreilly.com/2009/07/velocity-making-your-site-fast).\nLike us, our users place a lot of value in speed---that's why we've decided to take site speed\ninto account in our search rankings. We use a variety of sources to determine the speed of a site\nrelative to other sites.\n\n\nIf you are a site owner, webmaster or a web author, here are some tools that you can use to\nevaluate the speed of your site:\n\n- [Page Speed](https://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/), an open source Firefox/Firebug add-on that evaluates the performance of web pages and gives suggestions for improvement.\n- [YSlow](https://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/), a tool from Yahoo! that suggests ways to improve website speed.\n- [WebPagetest](https://www.webpagetest.org/) shows a waterfall view of your pages' load performance plus an optimization checklist.\n- In [Webmaster Tools](https://search.google.com/search-console), Labs \\\u003e Site Performance shows the speed of your website as experienced by users around the world as in the chart below. We've also blogged about [site performance](/search/blog/2009/12/your-sites-performance-in-webmaster). \n- Many other tools on [code.google.com/speed](https://code.google.com/speed/).\n\n\nWhile site speed is a new signal, it doesn't carry as much weight as the\n[relevance of a page](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=muSIzHurn4U).\nCurrently, fewer than 1% of search queries are affected by the site speed signal in our\nimplementation and the signal for site speed only applies for visitors searching in English on\nGoogle.com at this point. We launched this change a few weeks back after rigorous testing. If you\nhaven't seen much change to your site rankings, then this site speed change possibly did not\nimpact your site.\n\n\nWe encourage you to start looking at your site's speed (the tools above provide a great starting\npoint)---not only to improve your ranking in search engines, but also to improve everyone's\nexperience on the Internet.\n\n\nPosted by Amit Singhal, Google Fellow and Matt Cutts, Principal Engineer, Google Search Quality\nTeam"]]
