Speed Helps Your Ranking

• Login at https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/siteoverview
• Choose one domain to examine
• Click "Crawl Rate" under the "Statistics" tab.
• Click on the section called "Time spent downloading a page (in milliseconds)"

Under there you'll find a graph of when your server has been operating particulary quickly and when its been slow. Especially on shared hosting, having a lot of visitors in a short space of time is likely to slow down your site. Sites on dedicated servers are much less likely to have these problems.

Our most popular blog post so far (about the differences between Drupal and Joomla) caused pages to load in nearly 4 seconds instead of just 0.1 or 0.2 seconds.

Why does this matter? Well, Search Engine love sites with high "usability" and a site that takes 10 seconds to load each page is not going to be in their good books. This site has a good rundown of server times and why they matter. In brief:

• 0.1 seconds is ideal
• 1 second is about the maximum acceptable time
• Over 1 second on a regular basis and you really need to optimize your site