Any owner of online business knows that people do rate quick-loading and responsible websites highly, and Google, in its turn, also knows that speed supports usability. This proves the fact that the loading speed of your site is vitally important for increasing its conversions and sales. Recently Google has made an announcement that the page load time influences site’s Quality Score, which actually forced the overwhelming majority of website owners to reconsider load time factor and the way it affected landing page quality. If you have your Google AdWords account, from March 2008 you will be able to track a grade for your landing page’s load time in your account.

Obviously, PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising is extremely important for your website conversions and high loading speed is crucial for PPC advertising. Firstly, to increase site speed and conversions, you need to serve AdWords landing pages to Adbots as quickly as possible. Secondly, optimize your website only after profiling. In other words you need to use server profilers to find the components of web pages which take the most time to build. Your database and your templating engine are two main systems which can slow your page build times. To improve your database you need to find the best database administrator available and use it, test your slow query logs, use faster disks and more memory. To improve your templating engine speed, it’s recommended that you avoid unnecessary trips to the database, enlarge the memory and cache common page components/entire pages. It’s senseless to argue the fact that fast websites have more conversions and sales and benefit a lot more from PPC advertising; however some owners of rather prosperous online businesses still don’t bother much about making additional investments required to make their website not just reasonably fast but amazingly fast.

Let’s go back to the loading time, its grading and improvement. You can grade your loading time by using your Google AdWords account. Each keyword you optimize your web pages for, receives a load time grade according to the destination URL (the exact URL to which people come from this or that ad) associated with this particular keyword. So as a result, keyword’s load time grade depends on the keyword destination URL. Keyword load time can be graded as: 1) This page loads slowly; 2) No problems found; 3) Load time is faster than the average in your server’s geographic region.

Obviously, if your Keyword Analysis page shows the third variant of load time grade, this is the best evidence of positive effect on landing page quality.