We’ve always known that a fast-loading website appeals more to site visitors. But the consequences of a slow-loading site extend to search engine performance as well. Over the past year, Google has been putting new and stronger emphasis on the value of fast-loading sites.
Here are some Google resources to help understand this emphasis and diagnose your website’s performance:
- Let’s make the web faster
- Google Page Speed
- Measure Page Load Time with Site Speed Analytics Report
- Your site’s performance in Webmaster Tools
And here are some more online performance testing tools:
- Yahoo’s YSlow and YSlow for Firebug
- Pingdom: Test the load time of a web page provides a hierarchical waterfall graphic showing size and load time for all downloaded objects.
- Show Slow is an open source tool that helps monitor various website performance metrics over time. It captures the results of YSlow, Page Speed and dynaTrace AJAX rankings and graphs them, to help you understand how various changes to your site affect its performance.
- Web Page Performance Test uses Google Page Speed and other tools to provide a variety of performance metrics.
Over the next few months, we’ll be exploring some ways you can speed up your website, making your site visitors and Google happier.
Image credit: TAlex / 123RF Stock Photo
