Page Load Times maybe how your site is ranked is 2010

As a web site designer I often find myself trying to gently let clients know about page speeds and how adding in some of those wowie extras can bog down a page’s load time for visitors, especially with slower connections. This will infact adversely affect your site’s sales as well as visitor retention. Now it could also possibly affect how well or high your site ranks within the search engines as well.

I have always been a firm believer in something I was taught by a mentor years ago about page design. “People who surf into your site want the page to load quickly or they’ll leave.” The general rule of thumb is 10-15 seconds before you started loosing visitors to impatience. Yes, you can still have certain items on your page loading near the bottom if it, if said content loads in time for your visitors to read through your text before they get it to. Remember web site visitors skim your pages not read the entire page. Now your sites load time may directly affect how highly it ranks on Google.

Well it would seem that Google is vindicating me. In a Mike McDonald interview at WebCon Vegas with Matt Cutts of Google, Matt lets us know that there are many people at Google who believe the web should be a faster experience to make it more enjoyable. As well Matt states, “we are starting to think more and more about wheither page speed should be a ranking factor.” They’ve even rolled out a number of tools to facilitate this!

So as Google prepares to roll out Caffine and looks at the speed of the web, it’s a good idea to trust your designer on load times if you want your site to perform better in 2010 rankings. Google hasn’t implimented this as of yet, but from Matt’s comments in this interview it’s very likely that it will.