Google confirmed officially on its blog that it takes site speed into account when it decides how highly a website will be ranked on its search engine results. While usability experts have been preaching fast loading times for a while, the official announcement from Google casts the need to have a fast-loading website in stone. Google stated on its blog that it has conclusively proven with internal studies that when a site takes a long time to load, users spend less time on it, thus making it less attractive to Google than a site that loads quickly enough for the visitors to want to stay on it. What wider…