Speed - First, be aware that any search engine spider contains “time-out” code that prevents it from fully indexing a site that loads too slowly. If your web pages are large and your hosting provider is slow, this could present a real barrier to your full site being indexed. Secondly, you should note that an inadvertent leak of sections of the Google algorithm onto the web revealed that Google tracks a variable called timedout-queries_total, suggesting that the number of timeouts is itself also a factor in ranking. In other words, a site that takes ages to load (or crashes often; see below) is assumed to be a low-quality site and will thus rank poorly.

Fortunately, there is an easy way to check the speed of a site. Visit Alexa.com (a service from Amazon) and enter the homepage URL of some sample sites into the search box. Find each site in the list of results and click on the “Rank” link, then the “Overview” link. Alternatively, simply type into your web browser the URL http://www.alexa.com/data/details/main?url=yourdomain.com

Scroll down the Overview page until you get to the Site Stats section. Under the Speed heading you will see an assessment of the speed of this site compared to all the other domains in the Alexa database (which is pretty huge). The speed statistic is a measurement of the time it takes for pages on a site to load and is based on load times experienced by Alexa Toolbar users. Load times can be affected by a number of factors, including the size in kilobytes of your web pages, the responsiveness and location of the site’s servers, and the internet connection speeds of the site’s typical users.

I would ideally want to see (for my customers) a site rated by Alexa as very fast. At least 80% of all sites would be slower than yours and, preferably, 90% of all sites would be slower. However, this may not be possible if the nature of your business requires very rich (and thus large) web pages that are full of formatting, pictures, and text. In this situation you should benchmark your own speed against that of your competitors’ sites (again using Alexa). Ensure that you are at least 10 percentage points better than their position. Obviously, the best way to get a lightning-fast site is to pay for a lightning-fast hosting provider. Speed is a product of the computing power at the disposal of your host and the size of its pipe onto the internet backbone (among other things). If you are looking to host on the cheap, you may be disappointed. As for automobiles, power and speed tend to come at a price. Hosting is not an area where I would cut corners.

Comment an article   Name   E-mail    Title Available characters: 4000  Notify me of follow-up comments Enter what you see:

No comment posted