It’s really a Billion Dollar Attribute, but who’s counting.

Marissa Mayer is VP of Search and User Experience at Google. In a keynote speech at the O’Reilly Velocity Conference she recounted how a single simple change to the Google search results page improved the page load time. Not by much, but enough to improve the user experience and critically for Google improve the the click through rate on it’s Adwords sidebar.

Back in 2000 Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page asked Mayer to assess the impact of adding a column of text ads in the right hand column of search results. Back then that required an HTML table. But could this be implemented without the slower page load times associated with tables.

She found the “align=right” attribute that would allow the right hand table to load before the search results, adding a crucial revenue stream critical to Google’s financial success.

What does all this mean for you and your website? Page load times are critical, attention spans are getting shorter and user expectations are getting higher. If your web page doesn’t load quickly, your competitors site is just a mouse click away.

From Mayers keynote:

“Google tests the relationship between page load times and usage in regular experiments with subsets of users. “Injecting delays consistently produced a drop in searches,” said Mayer. An example: the number of search results, which defaults to 10 results. When some users wanted to see more results, Google tested pages offering 20 or 30 results, which added between 0.4 and 0.9 seconds to the load time.

The outcome: users seeing the page with 30 results would end up conducting 25 percent fewer searches, a trend which could equate to billions of dollars of lost revenue. Google allows users to customize their search settings, but the default remains set at 10 results.”

Table layouts can slow things down, too many images will slow things down. Flash movies are nice but can’t be read by search engines and will slow things down. Bad bloated code will slow things down. And all this could lose business that you could have had if your potential client hadn’t got fed up waiting for your website to load.

So how quick is your website?