The Google Webmaster Central Blog announced today that Google has added a site speed factor to their web search ranking algorithm. According to the blog post, “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.” Also, according to the blog post, rankings of fewer than 1% of all search queries are affected by the site speed signal that the Google engineers have added to the search ranking algorithm – which in reality translates to 1 out of every 100 queries. To evaluate your site performance, the blog post contains links to tools like Page Speed, YSlow and Web Pagetest, etc.

This change raises more questions than answers. Increasingly more sites are turning towards providing online interactive functionalities than just general information. The sites that provide interactive functionalities may have slower load times due the usage of images (as in photo galleries), embedded audio/video (as in gaming sites), or even sites that generate its content from databases. Large sites, that run on CMS like Drupal, may also be effected due to the numerous pre-process functions of the CMS.

As the blog community has started vehemently responding to this change, Google may make changes soon and this change may stay or may be rolled-back. Whatever the case, a point has been raised strongly – site performance is critical to engaging your users, whether you have a large site or provide sophisticated functionalities.

What’s your opinion? Do you think this is a good change?