I’d like to start a discussion on the topic of speed based on a comment from another thread, because it’s significant and timely–and rarely mentioned in this forum.

Faster server, faster connection, income up about 25%.

How did you come to the conclusion your site was slow? Visitor complaints?

By the way, recently in the AdWords Blog, Google said something which indicates it is finally understanding the significance of slow servers to its profits.

Landing page load time will soon be incorporated into Quality Score… As part of our continuing efforts to improve the user experience, we will soon incorporate an additional factor into Quality Score: landing page load time. Load time is the amount of time it takes for a user to see the landing page after clicking an ad. . . . 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 . . . users are more likely to abandon landing pages that load slowly, which can hurt your conversion rate. . . . In the next few weeks, we will add load time evaluations to the Keyword Analysis page (we’ll notify you when they are available). . . After the one month review period, this load time factor will be incorporated into your keywords’ Quality Scores. Keywords with landing pages that load very slowly may get lower Quality Scores (and thus higher minimum bids). Conversely, keywords with landing pages that load very quickly may get higher Quality Scores and lower minimum bids.

I have never seen anything from Adsense about making sure pages load fast enough. Google says it’s going to punish advertisers whose landing pages are too slow. But what about publishers? How much money is Google losing by poor servers? Millions?

How fast is fast? Are shorter pages the equivalent of a faster server? How much faster are your new servers?

I hate to bother with server changes if it’s not going to help. But the 25% income boost is intriguing.

How do you know you couldn’t make another 25% with even faster servers?

What are the internet industry standard server performance tests?

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