Website Speed Now a Factor in SEO

Google is obsessed with speed, and I admire them for that. Speed has always been an important metric to consider with your site because it improves the user experience. No one wants to be patient, even if it is virtuous. Users want the site now, and studies have shown that speed does impact their experience on your site.
If that isn’t enough for you, Google has officially announced that website speed is now one of the factors that go into their search engine ranking. It is only one of 200 such data points that Google analyzes your site for, but expect a lot of advances to be made in site performance soon. No SEO company will want to be left in the dust on this one.
Websites not optimized for speed can also increase your hosting cost. Optimized pages are smaller by definition, so less data is downloaded per user. If your site is being visited by thousands of people a day then speed optimization will save you money. This is a no-brainer that helps your users, your ranking, and your wallet.

At Inlet Media, I had not thought much about speed. I always optimized graphics, but have allowed other large files to grow. The initial analysis of this site showed that there were significant improvements I could make. This is a new metric Inlet Media will be using during the web design and development process, and I will be including it as a standard SEO service.

Hurrah for speed!