Last week Google came out officially and explained they are using “site speed” as one of their ranking factors.  Since then we have had some questions come into our web hosting helpdesk asking what this means.  You can read a good break down from Matt Cutts of Google:

“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.”

There are really two main factors that play into website speed:

1) How well your website is coded.

Most all websites have some coding errors and most will not have any impact on how fast your pages load.  However, some errors will cause pages to longer to load than others.  An example of this is when you perform a Google search then click on a website in the search results.  Most of these websites will load right away but every once in a while a website will take 5 to 10 seconds.  This might not seem like a lot to some people but your average internet user will not wait.  (yep, that’s how impatient we are) So, instead of waiting the 10 seconds the web surfer clicks the back button and proceeds to find the next search result.

2) How fast your web hosting company is. (fast if it’s McKremie)

More specifically how fast the web server is where you host your website.  There are tons of different factors of why a web server can be slow and the most common is overselling.  Some web hosts just keep adding new web hosting accounts to their overcrowded servers.   If you have checked your coding and your website still loads slow then I would suggest you switch web hosting as it could be costing you your rankings.  At least it’s one of the signals Google uses.

If you are a current client of McKremie Web Hosting you have little to worry about.   Our clients websites load very quickly.  In fact several of our new customers came to us via recommendations of website speed from current customers.