Google uses site load speed as one of the factors when ranking your site, check out this post from the official google webmasters site for confirmation

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/04/using-site-speed-in-web-search-ranking.html

This post looks into the reasons why Google would take site load speed so seriously and penalise slow loading sites.

User Experience

Google’s mission is to give the best search results for any given query,slow sites give a poor user browsing experience.

If you site loads slowly people will click away without reading your results (it’s true google have tested it in depth. more about that in tomorrow’s post) this means the search result google served up is not providing the best result to the query as no content was consumed. This is not in Google’s best interest.

Efficiency of the Google indexing

I’ve got no evidence on this one, it’s just my gut feel, but if Google is slowed down when trying to index your site, they are missing other sites, and their whole process is imapcted, they want slick sites which load quickly so they can index teh content and move on.

Slapping a penatly on slows sites will make you imrpce the speed and make their proicesses more efficient.

Slow Site = Less Visitors

Google make the rules I’m afraid, so a slow site will mean lower rankings which means less visitors to your site from the search engines.

Less visitors means less people reading your site, clicking on ads, visiting your sales page, joining your newsletter, promoting your art in social media, or whatever your reason is for keeping a site online.

How Does This Effect me As A WordPress Site Owner?

The majoroty of poeple I work with are small business owners or solo bloggers, you don’t have huge deep pockets to host your site on high speed servers.

You don’t have the cash to employ a staff of perforance tuning specialist like big business do.  I’ve worked on projects for multinationsl corporation before and they throw hundreds of thousands of dollars at high spec servers, parallel processing, and code optimised to the nth degree.  That is not something my average client can do, technically or financially.

If you use standard hosting, can you spped your site to avoid a hit from Google …

Can You Speed Up A WordPress Site?

In a word yes, there are a number of techniques you can use to speed up your WordPress site. They involve tweaking your site, optimising plugins and theme files. removing unnecessary code and caching your system with plugins.

I’m running a workhop on Thursday 12th May to teach people how to improve the speed of their site. For full details of the workshop, check out this post.

Image by photomonkey