Slow Websites Will Cost You Money

Google have just announced that the speed of your site will start directly affecting your profits. If you're using Adwords, fast landing pages will lead to a better Quality Score. Slow sites may well end up paying more for their clicks. More from the Google Adwords blog:

"Why are we doing this?

Two reasons: first, users have the best experience when they don't have to wait a long time for landing pages to load. Interstitial pages, multiple redirects, excessively slow servers, and other things that can increase load times only keep users from getting what they want: information about your business. Second, users are more likely to abandon landing pages that load slowly, which can hurt your conversion rate."

This is really confirmation of something we've known for a long time. Although theres a server full of information about you in Google headquarters, there's only piece of data about your website that they consider important enough to put in their search results - the size of your website: