Google has not made it a secret it wants the web to be faster, and with a lot of news out there popping up recently it is becoming quite clear that a speedy web is one of Google's highest priorities. Mashable asked recently if Google should rank web sites based on speed, and I say yes. Web sites that take a long time to load are, in my opinion, a sign of disrespect for your end user's time. Watching animated loading progress bars on flash sites is an absolute guarantee that I will leave. We live in an age where, if you can't find what you're looking for here, you can get it in an infinite amount of other places almost instantly. Why, when this is the case, would anyone choose to stick around on the site that takes the longest to load? There are no exceptions. Whenever I argue this point, people say to me, "but what about Coca-Cola or say, Molson Canadian? they have flash sites and features that take a while to load and they seem to be doing O.K." and to those people I ask, do you think that every single person who has ever visited molsoncanadian.com has stuck around to see the Flash features load? I doubt it. Even if just one person is turned away, for a small company, that could be everything. Here's a great piece about a site that can help you speed up your web pages: WebPageTest: Test Your Web Site's Speed
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