You may have the content right, perfect images and a great customer journey on your site, but is it quick enough?

Google has bolted a speed gauge onto its ranking indicator, so how will this affect your site and your ranking position on Google? Well, the speed gauge is going to measure the time that a landing page takes to load, this speed measure is called site speed or page load time. The clock will start when a visitor lands on the page and will stop when the page has fully completed loading.

This speed indicator was discussed last year and Google stated that it would be included into its ranking indicator. Now however, this discussion has turned into practice and the page load time is being incorporated into searches. For many businesses this inclusion of speed will not be an issue, because a quick loading page makes the visitor experience a lot better.

If your landing page is slow, all will not be lost.  You will not free fall down the rankings and Google will alter the ranking of one site per two hundred. How much of a penalty the new speed gauge will produce in terms of ranking is not known.

You might think that this new measure is a bit harsh but it’s all geared essentially towards rewarding websites that provide the best service. Also you can just force your way to the top of the rank without considering the visitors experience.

On the occasional websites that you come across, they are very slow which can be annoying, but with patience you find the product that you want and decide to make an order.  During the order process you are left hanging for a page to load and that patience runs out and you start the search all over again. This is what Google wants to eradicate as it comes under pressure from Bing.