Google Using Site Speed in Rankings: Should You Be Worried?

If you hadn't heard already, last month Google announced that their search algorithm is now going to include site speed:

You may have heard that here at Google we're obsessed with speed, in our products and on the web. As part of that effort, today we're including a new signal in our search ranking algorithms: site speed. Site speed reflects how quickly a website responds to web requests.

Speeding up websites is important — not just to site owners, but to all Internet users. 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. We use a variety of sources to determine the speed of a site relative to other sites.

So the big question for a lot of site owners is, "Should I be concerned?". And the answer is: not really. As one web developer tweeted, "If a site of mine scores higher than CNN.com on Google's Page Speed Score will I rank higher than CNN?" It's a rhetorical question, sure, but he's got a point.

If your site doesn't load very fast, you should be less concerned about how that affects your search engine rankings and more concerned with what kind of experience that's creating for your visitors. At the end of the day, it's about your content and your visitors. Is your content good enough to keep people coming back? If it is, that's what truly matters. Ranking well is secondary.