Google and Website Speed

[bacphiladelphia]

As you know Google announced some months a go that load speed of pages is a factor for ranking results. Now my question is: Has some body experienced penalizing because of low speed of his server?If yes, how did you solve the problem?
And should all of us buy dedicated server for our websites?

[Brad Callen]

From what I heard, it's something that most sites would not be negatively influenced by. It's for the sites that have horrible hosting/code that pages/whole site chronically load slow, maybe someone else can chime in.

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogsp...webmaster.html

And here is a quote from Cutts,

The main thing I want to get across is: don’t panic. We mentioned site speed as early as last year, and you can watch this video from February where I pointed out that we still put much more weight on factors like relevance, topicality, reputation, value-add, etc. — all the factors that you probably think about all the time. Compared to those signals, site speed will carry much less weight.

You can even test your site's PL speed in WMT's. From most of the comments on Google's blog, people are complaining about Analytics tracking code slowing their site down

[Scott Blanchard]

I agree with Brad, and the helpful resource links he provided.

In short, quality backlinks, followed by relevant, authoritative content is going to always trump other on page factors.

Site speed and page response time is perhaps more important for your users than for PageRank and SERPS at this point in time. Users who encounter a page that's unusually slow to load, will bolt for other options. In my own experience, I will not wait more than a few seconds staring at a slowly loading page before I opt out.

If you are using WordPress, the theme you choose is the major factor in site speed (assuming you are using a reliable hosting provider like hostgator, bluehost, etc). Choose themes that showcase SEO and speed, leverage linked css for presentation and xhtml for markup and you will achieve the optimum speed for delivering your content to end users.

If you are not already using WordPress (or a CMS in general), it can be significantly more difficult to remake your site for speed and will depend on how closely your existing site's content is coupled with the markup that defines the site structure. In this case, only consider designer/developers who understand how to leverage "Web Standards" based design utilizing xhtml for content layout and linked, highly optimized css for presentation. This results in the optimum balance of speed, ease of use, maintainability and cross browser accessibility.

[DailyMail]

I improved my site speed in half, but still very slow according to Google. I now average 6s, but Google think every page that takes more than 2s to load is slow. If you have dynamic content, database driven etc its hard to make less than 2s.

If everyone had tiny static pages just to meet Google's view of speed, the web would be very boring.

Anyway, I do think complying to speed test score may be useful, even if the site is slow, follow the guidelines they recommend cant be bad.

E.g.

- Parallellize your downloads
- Set cache time for all files
- Compress all files
- Cookie less domains

So setup a few subdomains for your static content, exclude cookies from them, enable compression and cache in Apache. Cookies use some overhead, wich you dont need for loading an image, for example.

After all, speed test (score) is just only one part of Google's formula, but it may be a good idea to improve. You can download Speed Test add-on for FireFox and check your own pages.

I did the above last month.

[mhuktar]

Speeding up websites is important — not just to site owners, but to all Internet users. Faster sites create happy users and we've seen in our internal studies that when a site responds slowly, visitors spend less time there. But faster sites don't just improve user experience; recent data shows that improving site speed also reduces operating costs. Like us, our users place a lot of value in speed