Speaking to Webpronews , he made two points. The New Year would see the rolling out of Google Caffeine, the company’s much-discussed new technology for indexing infrastructure. He also made the point that perhaps, time had come to reward the more efficient website owners, who had faster loading website and web pages.

Since, then site speed has come in for a lot of discussion.

What is high site speed:

From Google’s perspective of course, faster sites mean greater customer retention, and greater customer retention would translate into higher revenues through Google Adwords, which generates over 90 per cent of the company’s income.

However, having said that, it is also undeniable that a high site speed is also good for Internet users and the small businesses that Google supports. These are the small businesses that have websites on the Internet. As a search engine company which searches and indexes information on the Internet and as a major advertiser, Google helps these businesses increase their visibility, optimizing their marketing costs and assists them in tracking returns on investments.

From a user’s point of view, a high site speed is something that makes the Internet experience worthwhile.

Companies may spend millions on the back end of their businesses, but as far as the customer is concerned, as the end user, bulk of his time he spends at a website may be the time he spends staring at the screen, while he waits for all the components on the webpage to load.  These components include the images, style sheets, scripts, Flash etc.

Some web pages load slowly, others load faster. The speed itself may be dependent on  the contents of the page, the speed of the user’s computer and the very nature of the Internet connection itself, such as a dial-up or a broadband connection.

However, the average user himself is neither aware of these things nor is he even willing to apportion responsibility equally to whatever mars his Internet experience.

Instead, he would gravitate away from the site that loads slowly to those that load faster—thus rewarding those site owners who have a user-friendly website as compared to those who don’t.

Such natural selection already exists from the user’s end, but Google would also like to give weightage site speed while determining a webpage’s ranking on its search engines.

How important is high site speed:

Site owners cannot influence the speed of the user’s Internet connection. He also cannot possible decide which generation computer a user uses. However, what he can do is analyze the components that are on his website. This can be done in consultation with web designers or it can be done using several of the free and paid resources that are available online, including Google’s code for page speed  and Yahoo’s Yslow to run site speed tests.

What site owners also need to remember is that while site speed is going to be important, it will be one of the 200 factors that the Google spiders use while determining page rank. Hence, all changes must be made, bearing in mind that while site speed will matter, both from Google’s and user’s perspective, it will not be the sole factor which determines traffic to a website.