The Reciprocal Consulting Blog

Site speed has been an important metric for webmasters for a time now. Recently, Google announced that they have added a site speed metric to its Google Analytics product.

This is good news for webmasters. No longer do you have to guess at how fast your site is loading. And you don’t have to go out and buy a third-party tool to figure it out. If you’ve already got an Analytics account with Google, just login and take a look at your Site Speed Report.

The Overview part of the report gives you a pretty good look at the important information that you should measure. It includes analytics for

• Average page load time by browser
• By country/territory
• By page

These are important overview metrics, but if you want to drill it down even further, then you can do that too. You can view site load times in three ways including Performance, Explorer, or Map Overlay simply by clicking on the appropriate tab.

Intelligence Reports are reports that analyze your website to highlight any variance in your statistics. You can receive alerts when variations occur. You can also view Site Speed metrics in your Intelligence Reports inside your Google Analytics account.

Google is a company that is constantly improving its products. Google Analytics is a free analytics tool that anyone can use, and I’d add that it is perhaps the best analytics tool on the market. There is really no need to pay for analytics when Google provides it all for free.

So what are you waiting for? Do you know how fast your website is loading?

Does your website load slowly? If so then you need to figure out how to get it to load faster because Google has now made page load speed a ranking factor.

This is very significant. If you do any pay per click advertising then page load speed has already been a factor for your quality score. But yesterday Google announced that site speed will now be considered as a ranking factor.

This actually makes a lot of sense. Users don’t like to land on a page and have to wait for it to load. It could mean the difference between them staying on your site or visiting your competition. So why should Google be concerned about that?

Truth is, they’re not. They don’t care if you make any money or not. But they do care if they make money and they do care if searchers have a good experience on any site that Google sends them to. If your site is an AdSense site and it loads slowly then Google will make less revenue. If you advertise your site using pay per click advertising and it loads slowly then you’ll likely have fewer clicks and Google will make less money. See how it works now?

Fix your site load speed or you might start seeing your pages fall in the rankings.