Are faster blogs more Google friendly?

Per­haps. And if you’re look­ing to be found by Google, you want to do everything you can to make sure you’re not doing things to make the pro­cess harder.

A month or so ago, Google announced that they’re rank­ing sys­tem would take page-load speed into con­sid­er­a­tion when determ­in­ing how to present search res­ults to vis­it­ors.

Even­tu­ally I’d read enough about this, and had installed a cool free per­form­ance mon­it­or­ing sys­tem (powered by Ping­dom) that allowed me to review my web­site’s dis­play speed. But of course, life gets in the way and I’d been a bit lax in review­ing it, so this past week­end I took a look. I found this:

This is a response-time graph, the short­er the green line, the bet­ter. Which meant that I now had to spend some time fig­ur­ing out what I’d done that caused my sys­tem to slow so significantly.

It appears that the cul­prit was a mis-con­figured cach­ing plu­gin. So, I spent a bit of time play­ing with the set­tings on the cache plu­gin, removed a couple of fancy ‘type’ related plu­gins that were call­ing extern­al javas­cript (extern­al con­tent calls can really slow things down, espe­cially large con­tent objects), and tweaked how the cache works.

And in ini­tial runs, I seem to have reduced the page-load speed by about  40%. Not as good as it was ini­tially, but bet­ter than it was quite recently.Yes, I’ll be mon­it­or­ing res­ults a bit more closely now, and tweak­ing things as I go. And of course, I’m always open to sug­ges­tions too — in the com­ments please 🙂

Hope­fully, Google will look more favour­ably on my blog, as this site isn’t quite the slug on the Inter­net anymore.

Time will tell.