Google just added a new performance feature to the Labs section of its Google Webmaster tools. The ‘Site Performance’ feature displays a historical overview of your site performance (see picture below) as well as Page Speed suggestions for your slowest pages underneath.
The suggestions take the form of some stats on the page as well as suggestions to improve performance:
- [Link to the page]
- Details: Save up to [xxx] KB, [xxx] requests, [xxx] DNS lookups
- Enable gzip compression
- Combine external JavaScript
- Minimize DNS lookups
- Combine external CSS
Much has been blogged about Google’s new Caffeine engine and its effect on SEO and SERPS rankings. Google certainly seem to be pushing for faster page loading. I doubt Google will take this to the extreme though. If a feature doesn’t improve the quality of their search results, it won’t improve the user experience and it won’t make them more money. I wonder how much of it is posturing to get Webmasters to make faster sites. Sure, if your site is very slow, they may penalize you. But I doubt it will make a big difference on your SERPS ranking whether your site loads in 0.5 seconds or 1 second.
What it probably will affect is crawl rate. Google only has a certain amount of time available to crawl for each site. If your pages load slower, less of them will be re-indexed before Google moves on to the next stie. So your results may not be as fresh and that’s where I think the biggest penalty will kick in both currently and maybe more so under Caffeine.
