Website Performance and Page Load Time
One of the main reasons for people to hit the browser back button when they arrive at a website is slow download time, in other words the time it takes a page to load from when you first click the link to it. You should ensure that the main pages on your website load quickly and that your website visitors do not have to wait for any significant time for them to appear.
Several factors can affect the page load time including using large, high resolution images, Flash and certain types of scripting software. If you really must use this then ensure that a message is displayed immediately indicating how long the visitors may have to wait for the page to load.
It is worth mentioning that a Google software engineer (Matt Cutts) commented (in late 2009) on page load time as a factor in SEO. He did not actually say that this would happen but the implication was there.
Clearly there are some important websites and web pages, which because of the type of content they carry, will have genuine reasons for slow load time but Google will no doubt be able to recognise these. I reckon that it is better to be safe than sorry and to ensure that your pages are quick to load.
Update: Google have confirmed that Site Speed (which includes Page Load Time) is now factored into their algorithm.
You may have heard that here at Google we're obsessed with speed, in our products and on the web. As part of that effort, today we're including a new signal in our search ranking algorithms: site speed. Site speed reflects how quickly a website responds to web requests.
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