Site Speed to be Ranking Factor in 2010, Be Prepared

[joebert]

November 17th, 2009, 2:39 am

If you haven't heard yet, Google plans to have the speed of a site become a factor in SERPs in 2010.

Quote:

"Historically, we haven't had to use it in our search rankings, but a lot of people within Google think that the web should be fast," says Cutts. "It should be a good experience, and so it's sort of fair to say that if you're a fast site, maybe you should get a little bit of a bonus. If you really have an awfully slow site, then maybe users don't want that as much."

http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2009/ ... or-in-2010

It's nice to know, but a virtually worthless piece of information if you have no idea how to improve, or even test a sites speed. So I've included various links to resources for diagnosing and correcting slow site problems.

YSlow

Yahoo!'s Firefox extension.
http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/

Quote:

YSlow analyzes web pages and suggests ways to improve their performance based on a set of rules for high performance web pages. YSlow is a Firefox add-on integrated with the Firebug web development tool. YSlow grades web page based on one of three predefined ruleset or a user-defined ruleset. It offers suggestions for improving the page's performance, summarizes the page's components, displays statistics about the page, and provides tools for performance analysis, including Smush.it™ and JSLint.

Google Page speed

http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/

Quote:

Page Speed performs several tests on a site's web server configuration and front-end code. These tests are based on a set of best practices known to enhance web page performance. Webmasters who run Page Speed on their pages get a set of scores for each page, as well as helpful suggestions on how to improve its performance.

ApacheBench

Apache HTTP server benchmarking tool
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/programs/ab.html

Quote:

ab is a tool for benchmarking your Apache Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) server. It is designed to give you an impression of how your current Apache installation performs. This especially shows you how many requests per second your Apache installation is capable of serving.

Google Webmaster Tools

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/home

Let's not forget Googles Webmaster Tools. If you look at Diagnostics -> Crawl Stats you can get a really good idea of how long on average Google actually spends downloading a page from your site.

Attachments:

Diagnostics -> Crawl Stats

[righteous_trespasser]

November 17th, 2009, 5:45 am

Cool, just installed YSlow ... and I must say it's superbly helpful so-far ...

[Bigwebmaster]

November 17th, 2009, 4:29 pm

I have been planning for awhile to use PageSpeed and YSlow to make the websites I run seem faster. While I still have alot of work to do, one thing I did today was finally enable GZip for the deliverly of forum pages on ozzu. I am still monitoring this as I need to make sure the server resources are able to handle the increased load, but so far things seem faster to me here at ozzu. How about for you?

[joebert]

November 17th, 2009, 4:59 pm

If there's a difference from gzip being enabled now, it's negligible as far as browsing from page to page goes for me. My browser (Opera) pretty much always has Ozzus' resources primed in the cache and loading pages has never been slow for me anyways.

I was kicking around the idea of using gzip compression in combination with mod_asis awhile ago. I might have to revisit that thought here in the coming weeks.

November 22nd, 2009, 10:33 pm

Wow, I also installed the YSlow. This is awesome, gives me something to do with my free time during thanksgiving. It makes senses, that the site performance should be a weighting factor.

November 23rd, 2009, 9:06 am

Nice to know! thanks!

November 24th, 2009, 1:37 pm

Thanks. I don't think I have even looked at the speed in webmaster tools. I will right now!

November 26th, 2009, 4:47 am

Really very nice information.I have Shaw yslow and it is very helpful.
thanks joebert,

December 1st, 2009, 11:45 pm

Wow! great news. I have also installed yslow.....let's see what difference does it make...My fingers are crossed..

December 3rd, 2009, 11:08 pm

Yes it is really a nice information. If Google takes to consider the site speed some of the sites rank reduces. Thanks for the news.

December 4th, 2009, 2:37 pm

Google is getting busy in this "making the web faster" thing aren't they. I think it is a good initiative to take, I am kind of scared of their own dns, but I am sure that they will have a great service there too.

December 6th, 2009, 3:50 pm

I'm pretty fast and low KB as it is so I really hope they make this a factor.