Also for the people who share their thought on this one.

It will encourage companies to think about speed and discourage them from using excessive amounts of 3rd party media such as poor performing adverts and flash based content, etc.

I’m sure the speed metric will only count as a small plus towards page ranking and content will always be the primary measure.

At http://www.getmecooking.com we are implementing features to make the site as fast as possible – much faster than other large cooking sites. See how fast the recipe page dynamically loads 20 recipes at a time. Other sites such as http://haystack.com also do this.

There are still a lot of unknowns about how this will work, and another interesting issue is flash pages which are a preloader for larger flash content (loading 1%…2%…). No idea how they will score this type of thing. The use of CDNs are also another interesting area which should help load quality (multiple hosts, faster closer servers) and the pricing on CDN networks is now coming down to levels any webmaster can afford.

I have a feeling John and the Googlers will be quiet on this until it’s officially launched. But he’ll probably show up right about now to prove me wrong ;)

As Tom said – sorry I didn’t explain it better.

The way I understand it, page speed will be a measurement of the time the different elements on the page take to load. They will try to factor out the time it takes to reach the page itself. Maybe they can do this with their bot, by starting the count from the time they successfully connect with the page.

Load time would be a combined measure of the the page speed + the page retrieval time. Load time would also be subjective to the location of the user who is retrieving the information, so they will use an average for the servers in that region.

The reason people are saying the hosting needs to be good is that the CPU/RAM on the server will affect the time the page elements take to load. Shared servers with a heavy load will have less CPU/RAM resources to give your site.

If this is wrong, feel free to correct me! I’d like to get this right as it looks to be an important factor in 2010. Maybe we should try and get JohnMu to comment here? :)

Their Page Speed recommendations are sound enough but not specially convenient for certain types of dynamic content and in some cases may bork otherwise sound browsers like IE6. I’ve yet to see a site that ticks all the page speed boxes so I can’t see how this can be used as an effective, even if objective, measure of good end user experience.