Google Webmaster Tools has added a new section in the “Labs” menu titled “Site Performance”. This new feature provides statistics about how fast your web pages load, how that speed compares to other websites, and tips and suggestions for speeding up your page loads. It seems Google is leaning towards using page load times as another metric for search engine ranking. Should you be concerned?

What does Google have to say?

Google’s Matt Cutts hinted in November that site speed is important to Google, and it may be considered a factor when ranking websites in 2010.

From the “Learn More” link in Webmaster Tools:

Google’s goal is to provide users with the most relevant results and a great user experience. Fast sites increase user satisfaction and improve the overall quality of the web (especially for those users with slow internet connections), and we hope that as webmasters improve their sites, the overall speed of the web will improve…
It shows you the average page load time for pages in your site, the trend over the last few months, and some suggestions on how to make the pages load faster. Page load time is the total time from the moment the user clicks on a link to your page until the time the entire page is loaded and displayed in a browser.

What can you do about page speed?

The first step is to log into your Google Webmaster Tools account and see what Google has to say about your site’s performance. Take a look at the specific tips for various pages and see if any can be easily incorporated into your site. Some of the most common ones are:

• Enable gzip compression
  For static html content (html, css, js) enabling this feature can often help by compressing text before it is sent to the web browser. Modern browsers support this feature. It is not necessary to compress all pages for fast loading pages, but Google seems to think it can help squeeze out every possible ounce of speed.
  To enable gzip compression (for html, css, and js files) on a standard Apache webserver (which is what we use) you would add this one line to your .htaccess file:

  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/plain text/xml text/x-js text/css application/x-javascript

• Minimize DNS lookups
  Unless you have to load images, javascript, and other material from external websites, consider having as much content as possible load from your website only. This minimizes the time spent looking up other websites and fetching the files from external sources.

• Combine external CSS
  If you load 2 or more css stylesheets in your pages, consider combining them into one file which can load a bit faster.

Who you host with matters!

Your web host plays a large role in how well your site performs. Some of the budget hosts that offer enormous resources for a low monthly cost are cutting corners by overloading their servers with too many accounts, which leads to slower page loading for websites. Some hosts use inferior hardware that does not perform as well and as fast under normal conditions, resulting in less than optimal site performance.

If your site uses dynamic content such as MySQL or PHP, an environment that often gets overloaded or has CPU / hard drive issues (i.e. overtaxed, underpowered) will cause your site to load even slower.

Make sure your web host puts a large emphasis on server and site performance, and maintains peak performance for the majority of the time.

Short lived load spikes will always occur, but overall, your site should load quickly without too many delays or hiccups.

Use Static HTML pages whenever possible

Static HTML pages will almost always load faster than dynamic pages that require database information or calculations to appear. Unless there is a requirement for PHP/MySQL on some pages, consider using plain html (html, css, js, images, etc…) for the fastest loading pages possible.

If you have an ecommerce store, creating static html pages will help with page load times. See if your ecommerce software supports this feature. Many of our clients use ShopSite, which creates static html pages by default. This helps with faster page load times and often better indexing by the search engines.

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Since Google is making a big deal out of site performance and making the web faster, it would be crazy not to pay any attention to this facet of website design and development.

Log into your Webmaster Tools account and see what Google has to say. Monitor your site performance with this new tool, try to optimize your page load times, make sure you’re hosting with a company that cares about fast loading sites, and minimize code and items that could lead to a slower loading page.