Google Feeds Our Need for Speed

As a busy mother and business professional, my time is extremely limited. Each moment throughout the day counts. My guess is that your time is just as important to you! Google sure “gets” this concept and therefore acknowledged our need for speed online by folding this factor into its algorithm for ranking search results. In 2010, Google stated, “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 — that’s why we’ve decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings.”

What this means to the average website operator is that your page load time speed is an important factor to both search engines and human visitors. Therefore, it should be a heavily-weighted consideration when adding new content to your site.

Although there are already a number of tools that can be used to check your site’s speed, Google recently released an official product that measures load times by including a new report in their Google Analytics tool. What makes this tool different is that instead of measuring the time from which the document loaded to the time when all the documents objects were completely loaded, Google’s new analytics report is said to measure the speed from the time of the actual page request through the document loading and all of the objects finishing.

The new feature, once activated, displays load times for various pages and site assets under a number of different circumstances, such as: geographic location of visitor, media placement and technology used to access the page. This is fantastic news because it means it is not only easier to monitor your site’s speed, but you can also view this data in relation to your other site metrics allowing you to effortlessly recognize any correlation. This helps to determine whether or not the slowing of your site is actually driving your visitors and sales away.

All it takes is adding one simple line of additional code to your current Google analytics java script coding like so:

Once your site has received a couple thousand page views you’ll begin to see this report in the Content section of your analytics reports. Check out Googles’ help article for further installation information, but in most cases it’s seriously a snap!

You’ll then be able to start collecting the following:

• Which pages are slowest
• How page load time vary across geographies
• Variances in load time with different browsers

A slow page delivery can detract business from your site. People simply aren’t patient creatures, and if it takes even a couple extra seconds to load, many potential customers will go elsewhere.

Luckily speeding up your site can often be simple fix once you’ve identified the problem pages. Some of the most common causes for a slow page delivery are:

• Poor server quality
• Oversized embedded files such as images and videos
• Too many separate calls to external files

Google,of course, has an economic interest in making the web better as well as faster because the more time spent online means the more of their ads are clicked. And in truth, so do you! Isn’t it lovely when our interests align with Google’s? Here’s to speedy surfing for us all!

Elise Redlin

Elise is the Content & Marketing Manager at Vertical Measures, an internet marketing company in sunny Arizona providing services ranging from content marketing, to social media marketing, link building, and advanced SEO. She’s fully immersed herself into the world of content marketing and content strategy and is the managing editor of this blog. +Elise Redlin

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 1st, 2011 at 4:30 am and is filed under Measurement & Reporting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.