My question really is how important is site speed for search ranking position? I was frustrated to see that a blog of mine was shown in the Google webmaster tools as taking around 5 seconds to open, placing it in the slowest 10% of sites on the web, so I have taken several steps to try and improve that and I want to see if my ranking improves as a result. In this case I believe the big delay was caused by waiting for data from an external source.
I ran FireFox page speed on a site I did with Freeway and it scored a very respectable 90/100 but the one big red mark was that I wasn’t employing browser caching by specifying an expiry date. Is there a way for us to do this easily in Freeway? Possibly an action?
The same test said I should also enable gzip compression and minify the javascript. Again is there anyway to do these things in Freeway or some other simple way to achieve the task?
I have gone through my sites pretty thoroughly but fail to see how Google is getting such slow load times unless they are stuck on a a 28k modem in Siberia. I’ve just checked it now inside the webmaster tools and they say a page on my site takes 6.9 seconds on average to open which is slower than 86% of sites but for me it’s not taking anything like that even when I have cleared the cache.
Both the blog and the main site are opening in around 1 second here, yet I suspect I am being penalised because Google thinks my site is slow for some reason. I’ve even disabled all the external social media bits like twitter just in case that was slowing me down. I’d like to find the answer here because something doesn’t add up.