Site performance influences search ranking results

Posted April 14, 2010 at 6:21 am by Arjan de Jong in News.

On April 9, 2010 Google confirmed on its blog that the speed of a site will be included in search ranking algorithms from now on.

According to a recent internal study done by Google, a fast site not only increases user experience but also reduces operational costs. A slow site, on the other hand, results in visitors spending less time there.

As a site owner this means you have to start taking several matters into account like:

• From which part(s) of the world are my visitors coming and where is my site physically hosted?
• What is my current site performance from different parts of the world?
• What kind of content am I using and what can I do with it to improve my site performance?
• How can I track my site performance? Which tools are available?

Tracking site performance

Most statistical programs nowadays give detailed insight into where visitors come from, but lack the opportunity to check site performance based on the location of the visitor. Web requests to your site might be very fast when your site is hosted in the same location (country) as where some of your visitors are situated, but might be very slow when visited from the other end of the world. Therefore, it’s important to not only define the physical location of your target group, but also optimize your site performance accordingly. Tools like Watch Mouse provide more insight into the performance of your site.

Analyze your site

So, if I only sell products to customers who are located in the same country where my site is hosted, I do not have an issue? That depends. Site performance is not only defined by physical location. Your customer might be only 1 mile away from the place where your site is hosted, but can still experience a slow site. Using many scripts on your site, for example, result in many web requests, thus slowing down your site. Also, using dynamic content, flash animations, video, pictures, and audio might slow down your site.  Analyze your site thoroughly to see where you can improve. Maybe replace that flash animation by java script, combine or delete (unnecessary) scripts to decrease the number of web requests, use less video and audio, et cetera. There are always opportunities to improve your site without decreasing user experience.

Content delivery network

If your site has a lot of static content, you might want to consider using a content delivery network (CDN). A CDN is a network of strategically placed servers that delivers static content to an end-user. In most cases the static content will be images, videos, files, et cetera. Based on the geographic location of the end user, the content will be send from the nearest static content server. The goal of a CDN is to deliver the requested content as fast as possible. You can read more about CDN in our other blog post.