The benefits of a fast website

Over the past few years, the page-loading speed of a website has become a search engine ranking factor and we at Questra Consulting are taking this announcement very seriously. In a nut-shell, if your website loads fast there is a chance it could be ranked up higher in the search results than the other websites. The biggest search engine in the world, Google, has even released information and provided tools that can help webmasters and SEO professionals enhance the speed of their websites. Speeding up websites is important, as faster websites create happy users and visitors spend less time on websites that respond slowly.

What could be slowing down my website?

There are several factors that could be slowing down your site. Large images, too many images, too many file requests from the server, multimedia over-use, a cluttered database and low quality website code are just some of the factors that slow down a website. We examine the time it takes for your webpages to load, find the reasons and make the corrections. We will log the load times, determine which solutions will be needed to increase load-speed and providing you with our recommendations. We consider this type of page speed optimization an aspect of SEO.

How to measure your page loading time?

If you are a site owner or a web master, we can recommend a few tools that you can use to evaluate the speed of your website:

• Page Speed, available as Chrome and Firefox add-on, evaluates the performance of web pages and gives suggestions for improvement.
• YSlow, a free tool from Yahoo! that analyzes web pages and suggests ways to improve website speed based on a set of rules for high performance web pages.

Google Webmaster Tools (in Labs > Site Performance) shows the speed of your website as experienced by users around the world, using Page Speed mentioned above. In addition, you can use Google's Page Speed Service, an online service to automatically speed up loading of your web pages.

Adding site performance to Google Analytics

In the newest version of Google Analytics, a dedicated section on site speed has been added, showing you metrics for your content such as:

• Average page load time
• Average domain lookup time
• Average server connection time
• Average server response time
• Average page download time

In short, Google is obsessed with speed and you should care about it as well. However, don't go overboard. At the end of the day, the relevance of your page content outweighs the significance of speed as a signal in Google's search ranking algorithms.