Google now considers website speed in search ranking

Search engine giant Google will now include website response speed in its list of factors that affect its result rankings, the company announced recently.

The company announced on its blog that side speed is relevant because internet users are concerned with how fast a website responds to requests.

"Speeding up websites is important - not just to site owners, but to all Internet users," says Google. "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."

Google says its search engine optimization update is based on studies. The company measured responses of internet users after slowing down the search results of its website by 100 to 400 milliseconds, finding that people conduct 0.2 to 0.6 percent fewer searches because of the small change.

However, the website says that less than 1 percent of search queries are actually affected by site speed siginal and that the side speed factor currently only applies to English language searches.

In order to calculate website speeds, experts say users can test their sites with tools like Page Speed, an open source add-on for Firefox that offers page load performance tests and an optimization checklist to make pages faster.