A fast loading website is important for your ranking in Google

Google announced that speed is one of the factors that determine the position (ranking) of a website. It has been a while since webmasters who use Google’s Webmaster Tools can check their “site performance”. This tool shows how much the website is faster than your average website. In this online tool, you can also see many other things such as your site maps, site links, the most current searches, internal links, etc.

Tips to increase the speed of your website

How can you increase the speed of a website? Google offers you a lot of tips and tools, and the Webmaster Tools also allow you to get customized advice about your website. A fist step is code optimisation. A good scripting makes it possible to use internal resources (such as memory and CPU), as well as external resources, in a more efficient way. Nowadays, external resources such as databases, web services and other network-related traffic are constantly called upon. If problems or delays occur at that level, scripts are also slower. In that case, you must be certain that external resources are efficient enough. Caching can help remedy slow requests.

As a hosting provider, we regularly notice that websites are too large for their hosting infrastructure. Below, you can see the example of a second-hand marketplace that was migrated in September from a VPS to a more powerful dedicated server. For an identical number of visitors and using the same scripting, we noticed that the time to download a website (in milliseconds) was significantly reduced. In the “site performance” tab, an immediate change was visible. This shows the importance of a good hoster that provides customised hosting for your website.

A factor not to overestimate either

Google also advises not to focus on speed only. Indeed, it is just one of the 200 ranking factors. Relevance, reputation and focus remain important.

Of course, simple HTML sites load faster than websites using other scripting languages, but Google takes that into account as well. Their only aim is to make the Internet faster together with the community. In itself, it is thus a noble aim and the initiative definitely enhances the visitor experience.

Again, you know what to do: speed optimisation

Combell offers tools to perform an audit and benchmarking of your hosting infrastructure, but a first step is definitely to experiment with Google’s Webmaster Tools and optimise the scripting of your website. Small changes can sometimes have a significant impact on the performance of your website!