Thread: Web site performance

Yslow is a great product but don't read into it all that much. Most giant sites out there still get a grade of D of F. Sites are complex especially Real Estate sites.

Yslow is _ok_ however most top looking websites do sacrifice a bit of speed for design. Having said that your site should never take long enough to load that a user will cancel. I remember when for a while full Flash websites seemed to be an increasing thing and the competition for the longest preload seemed to also be becoming popular. Thankfully gone are the days you where expected to watch the 27% loader screen... but yeh Yslow does help in tweaking and optimizing it.

I've read recently that your sites speed could possibly effect rankings in search engines. I can't for the life of me remember where I read it, perhaps seoMOZ? Anyway, it's worth looking into.

Originally Posted by vccc

I've read recently that your sites speed could possibly effect rankings in search engines. I can't for the life of me remember where I read it, perhaps seoMOZ? Anyway, it's worth looking into.

I cannot supply the link for the facts but what I can say is that you are right.

Nobody sticks around to check out a slow loading site...

Originally Posted by vccc

I've read recently that your sites speed could possibly effect rankings in search engines. I can't for the life of me remember where I read it, perhaps seoMOZ? Anyway, it's worth looking into.

Google actually announced that sort of recently, so you could have read it on probably any technology or major news site.

Some things to keep in mind for this are that (A) Google probably won't implement this until later this year (unless it already came in the recent Caffeine update) and (B) Google's ranking algorithm takes into account hundreds of factors, so don't panic about it because the main factors (content, links, etc) will remain dominant.

At first it may seem unfair since some high-authority sites would have a real problem to make their sites faster, but when you consider how small a factor this is probably going to be in the Google algorithm, it's not like those sites will realize any penalties. Also, as Spectrum pointed out, if your site is too slow, people leave. So obviously speed and user-experience are related, and it makes sense for Google to account for it.

Originally Posted by kschweick

Google actually announced that sort of recently, so you could have read it on probably any technology or major news site.

Some things to keep in mind for this are that (A) Google probably won't implement this until later this year (unless it already came in the recent Caffeine update) and (B) Google's ranking algorithm takes into account hundreds of factors, so don't panic about it because the main factors (content, links, etc) will remain dominant.

At first it may seem unfair since some high-authority sites would have a real problem to make their sites faster, but when you consider how small a factor this is probably going to be in the Google algorithm, it's not like those sites will realize any penalties. Also, as Spectrum pointed out, if your site is too slow, people leave. So obviously speed and user-experience are related, and it makes sense for Google to account for it.

I agree. In fact, I'm sure they already have some part of it in their algorithm. I don't see how they would of kept it out for so long already.

Thanks for sharing.

Matt Cutts of Google said Page Load Time Speed IS a search engine ranking factor - but that might mean a very slow site is penalised in some way. It might not mean a fast page ranks any better than another fast loading page.

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