Google recently announced that your site performance, or the speed at which your web pages load, comes into the algorithm which affects your website ranking. This is something that we have suspected for a long time but it is now officially confirmed on the Google Webmaster central official blog.

At the end of the day, Google needs to provide searchers with a good user experience and we all get annoyed by slow loading websites, so if you find that your site has dropped ranking unexpectedly this could be one of the reasons.

There are a lot of different factors whcih could cause your web pages to load slowly.

First of all is the bandwidth allocated to the server hosting your site. If you are on shared hosting then you will be sharing the bandwidth allocated to the server with sometimes hundreds of other websites, and the more websites sharing the same bandwidth, the slower your pages are likely to load. Shared web hosting solutions don’t usually tell you how many sites are on the same server but you can find this out with a Firefox Add-on called ShowIP which lets you see the number of other sites hosted on the same IP address, among other things.

Secondly there is the speed of the server itself hosting your site. Usually shared web hosts advertise the specs of the server itself and just like a PC, the more RAM and the higher the spec, the faster it will server web pages.

Third and very importantly, is the code which is powering your website. If you have a dynamic website you are probably using PHP or ASP to pull information from a database. Every time a page loads it requests info from the database and if the code is not well written there could be problems with page speed. You may be using more queries than you need to extract the information required.

Some wordpress themes also cause your page load time to increase. For example while Altahualpa is very flexible I personally found it doubled my page load times because it has to query the database to get the stylesheet information as well as the page information. However you can probably get round this by using the WP cache plugin. A theme which is just as powerful but loads much faster is Thematic.

Fourthly make sure you optimize your images. If the file size is too big then they will take a long time to load. And if you are coding in HTML make sure you don’t throw everythign inside a big table. The browser will need to load the whole table before it displays what is in it. You are better off using CSS for positioning and styling.

So if you are experiencing slow page load times first of all check your code and make sure it is not the website itself, before looking into your web hosting solution. Most web hosts allocate reasonable bandwidth and server speed to your site.

If you have a very large website or very high traffic and you are still on shared hosting, then you should consider upgrading to a semi-dedicated web hosting solution ideal for small business web hosting. It is easier than you might expect. The semi-dedicated hosting solution is often exactly the same as the shared hosting, except there are fewer sites sharing the same server. For example with one of the hosts I use each server is allocated 1/6 of the storage and guaranteed a minimum performance level in terms of server speed and RAM allocation.

Checking Your Website Performance

You can find out how well your site is performing by going to Google Webmaster Tools. If you are not using Google webmaster tools you should be. You can sign up for a Google Account free and search for “Webmaster Tools” and add this to your Google account. You will need to upload a piece of code to your site to show that it is yours, but after that you will get access to a heap of information about your site, including the site performance. This article from Google gives in depth information about checking your site performance with webmaster tools.