My buddy, Doug McFaddin at PhotoOne Software ran the following blog a few days ago and it just makes so much sense as one more point we all tend to forget about.  How fast does your site load?  Even more important is how often do you check your site?

At IPI’s (Independent Photo Imagers) conference this past summer, when I suggested people needed to check their website every morning, one of the attendees gave us a great idea.  There are six people in his company and every morning, when each person boots up, they each check a different page of the website to make sure everything on the site looks good and loads right.

You’ve made an incredible investment in your website.   What good is all that work if the site isn’t working as efficiently as it could be?

We discussed website load speed back on September 17, 2009 in the blog post Website ? and how important it is to a visitor’s overall experience. Although a bit extreme, the statistic I cited in that post was that ” . . . Google has found that as little as a millisecond in load time for their pages can be the difference of millions of incremental dollars.”
Fun Friday Links

In an effort to continue to evolve best practices, Google is adding load speed to their SEO algorithm. January 2010 is the rumored start for this additional factor making the optimization of page loading more important than ever.

I like this change by Google to the algorithm. On the one hand, it will make for more page-loading efficient sites resulting in a better visitor experience and retention — on the other hand, it will lower the use of bandwidth and possibly hosting fees. As the larger companies/websites become more load efficient our expectations will shift and we’ll expect the same performance from both big and small.

A free tool that we use at PhotoOne is WebSiteOptimization. It is setup to allow you to enter your sites URL and submit for diagnosis. As outlined on the bottom of their Homepage, the website speed test will “ . . . help you find out if slow pages are hurting your business. It will test page size, composition, download speed and point out some of the things that need to be done to increase your on-line competitiveness.”

For all of us who hate waiting in lines(*), go ahead and check out WebSiteOptimization. If you haven’t had your site tuned-up in a couple of years, it might be a good New Year’s resolution.

(*) fun fact: during your lifetime you will have spent roughly 5 years in a line.