Today on the Google Webmaster Central Blog, Google confirmed the rumors that they are now measuring site speed and it **MAY** affect your ranking. Let me type that one important word once more:

** MAY **

From Google’s own digital pen:

While site speed is a new signal, it doesn’t carry as much weight as the relevance of a page. Currently, fewer than 1% of search queries are affected by the site speed signal in our implementation and the signal for site speed only applies for visitors searching in English on Google.com at this point. We launched this change a few weeks back after rigorous testing. If you haven’t seen much change to your site rankings, then this site speed change possibly did not impact your site.

Translation

Do not fixate on this small component of your site’s overall ranking in Google. Site speed affects less than 1% of all sites, and is not a significant ranking factor in Google’s algorithm.

However…

How fast your site loads is important to your visitors and potential customers. Customers may only wait 2 seconds before moving on to another site. Focus on your site’s overall performance to maximize the experience for your users.

How to measure your site’s speed?

Google’s blog post lists a number of sites and tools you can use. We also covered this in these two previous blog posts:

Google May Now Consider Page Load Time

Google Site Performance – No Need to Panic

…

So take this new announcement by Google with a large grain of salt, make sure you keep the big picture in mind when it comes to SEO and ranking in Google, and make your site fast for your customers and visitors, not for some fractional equation Google has created.