Google is now using site speed as a consideration when ranking sites in its search results, giving webmasters yet more food for thought. In a blog post yesterday, Google fellow Amit Singhal and principal engineer Matt Cutts revealed the news, arguing that speeding up the response times of your site is important for both site owners and user

Faster sites create happy users and we’ve seen in our internal studies that when a site responds slowly, visitors spend less time there, they wrote.

But faster sites don’t just improve user experience; recent data shows that improving site speed also reduces operating costs. 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.

Singhal and Cutts recommended several tools webmasters can use to evaluate the speed of their sites.

These include open source Firefox/Firebug add-on Page Speed, Yahoo tool YSlow, and a Google function in its Webmaster Tools section.

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