Google announced that it will be adding “site speed”, how quickly a website responds to web requests, as one of the data points it uses to rank its search results – meaning that if your site is slow, you’ll be pushed down the ranking making it harder for people to find your website. This also means that you’ll be rewarded in Google’s search ranking if you have a fast website.

They also created a new tool for webmasters to use to determine how fast their site is, according to Google anyway. I used their tool to find out how fast our site was and posted the results below.

Performance overview

On average, pages [on eNeighbors.com] take 0.6 seconds to load (updated on Apr 14, 2010). This is faster than 97% of sites. These estimates are of high accuracy (more than 1000 data points). The chart below shows how your site’s average page load time has changed over the last few months. For your reference, it also shows the 20th percentile value across all sites, separating slow and fast load times.

If you want to try it on your site, go to http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools and click Labs –> Site Performance.