What is the latest take of Google and page load speed

[craigmn3]

I've optimised pages in excess of 1 meg. I don't think its Google that's the problem. Its really a question on usability. With mobile growing rapidly I'd worry more about the lack of bandwidth that many of your potential visitors may suffer from.

yes I will have a seperate forwarded section for mobile devices.

There are two goals in mind with this site.....one that it be found (optimization and thus my concern about page load speed effecting optimiization) and two that there is enough sizzle to sell the steak. and that sizzle requires big lovely pics (not so much flash) but if I am hearing right, as long as I keep it at or below 1 MB I won't offend google....I won't send the customer looking for his back button and I can still have a fair amount of sizzle, get my client gets his sales, and everyone is happy.

[dgswilson]

Maybe I'm reading it wrong but I didn't see a big difference between load times. I usually look at (my) server load time. I don't know what to do for a slow connection on the user's end.

For me, page load time and everything else to do with web pages, it's all about users. Does google even know how fast a page loads? In WMT's they state that their report is not accurate. I do love fast pages though and I'll include a micro-timer so I can see what my end is doing.

There are always recommendations for using css sprites but I don't know if I'd trust such traditionally whimsical creatures to deliver the goods in a timely manner. It's not like I could keep an eye on them day and night.

[bermuda]

One point coming to my mind is about comparing your website structure with the ones already used by your colleagues and main competitors online. Of course it is your own website and you can decide whether it will take a few seconds of time for your contents to appear on net audience's browsers or a couple of minutes but a general idea would be trying to figure out what trends and systems are used by other sites in your web niche.

Naturally, having a site which loads super fast would be a one big advantage of most websites because even if everyone is using DSL lines or very fast Wireless connections, but not everyone is interested in watching all multimedia stuff loading on sites. If you believe the materials on your homepage will help people staying longer on your site and looking at more sections of it, the loading time may not be a huge issue.

Google is said to like fast loading sites but discussions about sizes of the pages refer back to several years ago, naturally even Googlebot has improved and can access sites better and take snapshots of their contents faster, even if they are heavy in size.

[deepsand]

One point coming to my mind is about comparing your website structure with the ones already used by your colleagues and main competitors online. Of course it is your own website and you can decide whether it will take a few seconds of time for your contents to appear on net audience's browsers or a couple of minutes ...

A couple of minutes? Where did that come from?

Google is said to like fast loading sites ...

Not quite the case. Google's samplings in this regard are admittedly statistically small in number and subject to great variability owing to cause that are site independent. Thus, it uses only a relative ranking as compared to other sites; and, gives such but a small weight in the SERP algorithm.

... naturally even Googlebot has improved and can access sites better and take snapshots of their contents faster, even if they are heavy in size.

Impossible. All that a crawler/robot/spider can do is to issue a request for a file and wait for a response, just like your browser does.

[bermuda]

A couple of minutes? Where did that come from?

You know, there are some websites that when you visit their homepages, you will find Flash movies, very heavy in size, and they have been prepared by CEOs of the firms and as you would agree with this fact, there are still millions of people who access the net using traditional methods, not DSL lines. Of course those sites could be like minorities on the web but they exist.

By the way, thanks for the point about how Google crawler accesses contents of the websites. The point seemed new to me as I thought Google is today using enhanced methods to access sites and even if they are big in size, it will scan them fast.

[deepsand]

You know, there are some websites that when you visit their homepages, you will find Flash movies, very heavy in size, and they have been prepared by CEOs of the firms and as you would agree with this fact, there are still millions of people who access the net using traditional methods, not DSL lines. Of course those sites could be like minorities on the web but they exist.

Granted. But, in the context presented, it gave the appearance of referring to the OP's site and the size/time data provided.

By the way, thanks for the point about how Google crawler accesses contents of the websites. The point seemed new to me as I thought Google is today using enhanced methods to access sites and even if they are big in size, it will scan them fast.

Crawlers/robots/spiders are like any other User-Agent, and do not have special access rights.

They cannot access directories, they cannot use protocols other than the ones supported by the hostname, and then only those allowed for anonymous use. And, regardless of the protocol used, a complete copy of a requested file must be transferred from the server to the client machine, over the same communications channels as used by other clients.

A crawlers/robots/spider is simply the front end of your browser that issues file requests. Whereas your browser then renders a display, a crawlers/robots/spider stores the file for later parsing and indexing by the indexing engine, and then gets another file as commanded.

[freehits]

"Thus, it uses only a relative ranking as compared to other sites;"

Favors smaller? With the bar of what is smaller (faster) decided by the competing sites?
Any good articles on this? or Cutts videos? thats interesting.

[deepsand]

Webmaster Central Blog: Using site speed in web search ranking

Matt Cutts: Google incorporating site speed in search rankings

More can be easily found by searching for it.

[dgswilson]

Below is the tool I prefer for checking pages. If anyone knows exactly, for certain, how to "Specify a Vary: Accept-Encoding header" with examples of "send this or that to browser" - I would be grateful. I understand what it's for I just don't have the wording for htaccess (gzip or ?).

http://tools.pingdom.com/

[freehits]

Nice thanks for the video, the cutss blog post was even more informative.

When I read it I get a sense that it is a business m,ove by them and not a real factor.
The post spends so much time speaking in generalities about faster is "better for the world"

And also so much time ensuring everyone there is little chance you will ever notice the difference.

I wonder if this was a planned press release of sorts to get the world scrambling to shrink page size and save google overhead on caching and spidering billions of sites.

As in, they release a small blurb about, make your site smaller and faster, it has a 1% chance of changing something.
The actual effect probally much less, but the real effect is that they cut a few % off the overall average size of the pages they cache and spider.

Even had the assault on meta tags in there. As in if they got every person on earth to remove the meta tags from their sites, the cumlative effect for what they crawl/cache in a year would be huge.

Maybe I need my tin foil hat.

- And yes, smaller and faster loading is always better, thats true. ie craigslist.