How does Google determine page speed ?

     Many people asked how does Google determine page speed ?!  In google webmaster tools some pages are listed as very slow 8 plus seconds but I have tested on older computers and browsers and they do not take anywhere near that long to load why might Google show such high numbers .

Well the fact is we're looking at using tool bar data and that's using tool bar data only from people who have opted in but that's looking at real-world load times from from people for example if you're in the United States we might say how long does it take to load this particular page and so if we're looking at that and it takes a long time sometimes it's not necessarily your site it could be the network connectivity but it's a good thing to bear in mind it's coming from all these different users who can have dial-up lines they can have slow connections and so a lot of times people say oh I'm just going to throw a 500 kilobyte page out there and they forget there's a lot of people with slower connectivity so that data is based primarily on tool bar data .

If you're you've got a lot of users who are having a slow experience then that can affect the overall rating one thing to bear in mind however is that only something like one out of a hundred searches is site speed such a factor that it would actually change the rankings to a noticeable degree .  so that's something on the order of you know one in a thousand sites have truly site speed as a really big issue for them it's always good to see if you can move a little bit faster and try to return results to users a little bit faster it makes your website experience more fluid it makes your users happier there's good studies that sort of say the return on investment is definitely worth it but at the same time I wouldn't stress overly about it but I just wanted to give you a little bit of visibility about how we compute when we think a particular site is slow in Google Webmaster Tools .

 

Is page speed a more important factor for mobile sites?

Is load speed a more important factor for mobile ? is it really something that can change your rankings all things being equal ,, Okay let's start with the second part of that questions all things being equal if your site is really really slow we've said that we do use page speed in our rankings and so all of the things being equal yes a site can rank lower now we tend not to talk about things in terms of like an absolute number of seconds because websites do work differently in different parts of the world and there's different bandwidth and speeds in different parts of the world however it's a good way to think about it to say okay look at your neighborhood of websites look at the sites that are returned you know along with you and then if you're the outlier if you're at the very bottom end because your site is really really slow then yes it might be the case that that your site will rank lower because of its page speed now what's interesting is that factor applies across the board it's not specific to mobile.

So going back to the first part of your question it's not that in mobile we apply that any more or less than we do for desktop search but if you're using your mobile phone you do care a lot about whether we'll load in a reasonable period of time and so we'll continue to look at ways to improve the way that we find out how fast a site is the page speed for a particular page and then try to figure out whether it makes sense okay if we want users to be less frustrated then maybe over time it does make sense to incorporate that more into our rankings or more for mobile something along those lines .