The faster load, the better

Some news out of this week’s Pubcon Conference in Las Vegas.

It seems as if fast load times for your website might have a positive effect in influencing your search rankings. That all being said, having slow page load times seemingly will not negatively impact your rankings. Source.

This is reported to have come from Matt Cutts, head of the Webspam team for Google.

It’s a no brainer that, in terms of usability, a fast load time for your web pages definitely helps a user’s overall experience when browsing your site. We’ve all been to “that site” where pages take forever to load. I don’t know about you, but if I encounter a website with slow load times, I usually leave and look for similar information elsewhere.

It will be interesting to see if this ranking factor remains to be, more or less, a small influence or if it will become a bigger part of the search engine ranking puzzle.