There’s been a bit of talk recently about the Google announcement that the speed of a web page is now a factor for search engine rankings. If you think speed is an issue on your site, it’s more than just Google rankings that will affect your business. If your site is too slow for users you will lose customers. So how do you know if web page speed is an issue for you?

So what defines the speed of your website? There are a number of factors to consider:

1. Your Domain name
The time it takes for your domain name to resolve to it’s web hosting address. Not much you can do here.

2. The network between host and visitor
The network travel time between your web hosts location and the location of the visitor. This is why it’s important to use an Australian host if you are targeting customers in Australia. And beware of the Australian resellers who sell you hosting space that resides in the U.S. or elsewhere.

3. Page rendering
The time it takes the web browser to understand the structure of the page and render it. This is where the expertise of your web developer comes in. Nicely constructed (and validated) XHTML and CSS. Note that some browsers are faster than others. If you want to browse fast use the fast browsers such as Firefox and Safari and give Internet Explorer the boot! Also, if you are managing your own content, you are also responsible for the web browser load time. Uploading images to your content management system that are not properly optimised for web are often top contenders for speed issues.

4. Scripts and plug-ins
Time to make all the fancy bits of your site work. That’s all the javascript, flash and so on. Again, your web developer should be looking at how best to optimise these elements to get the basics of your site loaded and ready to go first, and anything that won’t be used immediately might be a contender for deferred loading techniques. A few quick tips here include making sure your stylesheets are called before any javascript, and using as few script files as necessary. By combining scripts into larger files, it reduces the number of times the browser has to go back and forth to the web server. While this is generally milliseconds, it all adds up.

So what is the speed to be aiming for? Web infrastructure leading firm, Akamai, conducted a study in 2009 that came up with the magic number of 2 seconds. To me that sounds about right. For my personal browsing it will depend on how much I want the information on the web page, but if I’m shopping or looking for service providers, I’ll certainly give up on a website after a few seconds of inactivity.

As for the Google rankings, while Google has officially announced that it is a factor, it’s only a small one. As stated in the Google Blog recently “While site speed is a new signal, it doesn’t carry as much weight as the relevance of a page. Currently, fewer than 1% of search queries are affected by the site speed signal in our implementation and the signal for site speed only applies for visitors searching in English on Google.com at this point.”

So while it has become a factor for your Google rankings, looking at the speed of your site is more important for another reason, getting and retaining customers. How does yours measure up?