How an overloaded server could hurt your Google ranking

There have always been rumours that site speed impacts Google search rank, but now Google has confirmed this myth on its blog:

Like us, our users place a lot of value in speed — that’s why we’ve decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings. We use a variety of sources to determine the speed of a site relative to other sites.

While speed only accounts for a small part of overall rank on Google, it’s still very important. Since people don’t like waiting, increasing your site speed by even half a second can drastically increase your traffic and conversions.

It also means that server load makes more of a difference than ever. If your shared host places too many sites on a server or you’re a stingy dedicated server customer, your site’s ranking on Google could suffer. There has never been a better time to optimize or upgrade your server.