There have been rumours floating around in SEO circles that Google would soon be putting weight on website response time as a factor affecting their search engine ranking. It’s now official, the official Google Webmaster Blog published a post today announcing the launch of their new Site Performance tool.
Website performance is something that a lot of developers leave to chance and don’t address head on, and many websites (in particular WordPress backed sites that are plugin-heavy and don’t make use of page caching) are relatively slow to load. There are many factors that affect the speed of websites, but they’re usually quite readily identified and fixed. It’s likely that developers will pay closer attention to page load time now that Google have announced they’re watching it.
Although Google and the other Search Engines won’t publicise every factor that affects a webpage’s search engine rank, they often give strong hints and the release of a new tool like this is probably the strongest hint they’ll give.