Last week we talked about some tips for speeding up how quickly your site loads.  Beyond the user experience, there’s a solid reason to ensure your site loads as fast as possible – Google may penalize sites that load slowly.

Google recently released some information about SPDY, a new web protocol that compresses site load times to make them faster. Geeky and totally outside the realm of a legal marketing blog, but it tips Google’s hat a bit to show that they’re interested in maximizing user experience on this front.

In fact, Google’s Matt Cutts told people at a recent trade event that slow page load times won’t negatively impact how well your site ranks, but fast load times may have a positive effect. This all makes sense on a certain level. After all, Google wants people to get what they want as quickly as they want to get it. Fast sites are better than those that leave us drumming our fingers impatiently on the desktop.

Let’s be clear.  Even if it doesn’t hurt your site, if it does help everyone else then you lose by default.

If you’re using Google Webmaster Tools you can download a Firefox add-on to check your site’s load time on the fly review performance in the browser. You can also head over to this tool provided by Pingdom, to see how well things are working.

Photo courtesy of Amplified-Photography.