So it has been said for a while but it looks like it may finally become a real fact. Google has announced that from 2010 the speed of your website could become a factor in the authority/ranking of your website. More and more businesses are looking to get an edge when it comes to ranking in google and even something which many only be a small factor (as i suspect it is) can make a huge difference when the competition is so fierce.

If you think about googles reasons for introducing this change it does kind of make sense. Google has always been about the overall experience of the user and what annoys users more than a website that is slow to load? However i must mention at this point that there can be two main factors why a site may be slow to load:

1. The web hosting service is just plain slow. This is obviously the easiest one to fix as i just means you have to get a new web-host. However finding a new host can also be alot of hassle too and will sometimes mean you have to pay more £££! Moving your site can also be a pain too, depending on the type of site you have. For instance if it is a ecommerce site there could be a bit of initial setup involved and you may have to get the person who initially created the site to complete the installation for you.
2. The second option is an often overlooked factor and it is that your website is too large as far as file size is concerned. So while the web host is able to send your site out the visitors at high speed the visitor can only receive the site as fast as their connection will allow. Dont forget that many people are still in slow dialup connections (especially in developing countries) and may not be able to view your site within a reasonable time. The solution for this is to re-design your site with speed in mind. Lose any very large pictures or flash movies and concentrate in breaking the content up into bite-size chunks.

So as you can see the two factors above require a reasonable amount of work no-matter which is related to your site. So why go to all this hassle in the first place? Is is just for Google? Well no, this shouldn’t just be something you are doing to keep google happy but because you want to increase the overall profitability of your business on the web. This is especially true of ecommerce sites as it has been proved more than a few times to me that potential customers do not hang around long if there are service problems on with your online shop. How confidant can they be of getting what they paid for if you can’t even get your website to work?

I once read that even amazon.com has a cart conversion rate of only 40% which is the number of people who add things to the online cart and then go on to buy. You may think this number is very low considering that amazon has so much trust with customers but it is a pretty standard number across the industry. However also realise that you as a start-up business are going to have an even smaller conversion rate as customers have never heard of you before and may be nervous about purchasing. The point i am trying to make is that if there are problems with the booking process or website in general such as pages being slow to load then your conversion rate is going to go through the floor!

As you can see a slow web hosting service isn’t going to just affect your position in google but the revenue of your site as a whole and so it has to be one of your main priorities for your internet business. Still one of the hardest things is working out who the fast hosting providers are, as they all they they have high speed connections don’t they! Well the main thing i would look for is the right account with plenty of bandwidth for the month as a whole. Also checking for guaranteed uptime is also a good thing to look for. So hopefully ive given you a few reasons to look for speed in your next hosting provider and maybe youll be zooming your way to the top of google in no time.