Google Tools: How fast is your site?

[djbaxter]

How fast is your site?
Google Webmaster Central Blog
Wednesday, December 02, 2009

We've just launched Site Performance, an experimental feature in Webmaster Tools that shows you information about the speed of your site and suggestions for making it faster.

This is a small step in our larger effort to make the web faster. Studies have repeatedly shown that speeding up your site leads to increased user retention and activity, higher revenue and lower costs. Towards the goal of making every webpage load as fast as flipping the pages of a magazine, we have provided articles on best practices, active discussion forums and many tools to diagnose and fix speed issues.

Now we bring data and statistics specifically applicable to your site. On Site Performance, you'll find how fast your pages load, how they've fared over time, how your site's load time compares to that of other sites, examples of specific pages and their actual page load times, and Page Speed suggestions that can help reduce user-perceived latency.

Access Page Speed from Google Webmaster Tools. Select one your sites from the "dashboard" and you'll see the Page Speed option listed under Labs | Site Performance in the left hand menu.

More information

 

[djbaxter]

Interestingly, Google's results for two of my sites that I checked complained about uncompressed javascript and additional DNS lookups for...

...wait for it...

Google AdSense and Google Analytics.

They also suggested I should enable GZIP on my server (it already is).

I think Google has a little bit more work to do on this one.

 

[Adammo]

Didn't notice this before. Mine complains quite a bit about grabbing css from two files. Can't really change that I don't think with my theme though:

There are 2 CSS files served from teamcanadahockeysite.com. They should be combined into as few files as possible:
http://teamcanadahockeysite.com/wp-content/themes/WP_Premium/style-red.css
http://teamcanadahockeysite.com/wp-content/themes/WP_Premium/style.css

 

[seo_marketing]

This tool should be available for anyone regardless of whether your website is submitted to webmaster tool or not.

Website's should load quickly and this can help to improve your SEO rankings especially if your website is a big e-commerce site.

Search engines enjoy playing with content which they can feed quickly into their stomach.

 

[Fawzy]

You can also check this online tool: websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/
it tests page size, composition, and download speed and gives you a detailed report