Google announced that it’s started to factor site speed into its search rankings. Bloggers Amit Singhal and Matt Cutts both stated that site is speed is something that everyone should pay attention to.
“Speeding up websites is important – not just to site owners, but to all Internet users. Faster sites create happy users and we’ve seen in our internal studies that when a site responds slowly, visitors spend less time there. But faster sites don’t just improve user experience; recent data shows that improving site speed also reduces operating costs.”
If you’re interested in this, there are some free, Google-approved tools that used to check site speed: PageSpeed, YSlow and WebPagetest.
They both wrote, “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.”