Recently, Google announced that a website’s speed (how fast your webpages load in a visitor’s browser) is now to be a ranking factor in determining how well a website ranks on their search engine. If your pages load very slow, you may have a harder time getting your website to rank for your targeted terms.
Here are some useful tools you can use today to start testing and improving your website’s speed…
Google started this whole conversation, so it’s only fitting that I lead with Google’s Page Speed for a website speed enhancement tool. Page Speed is an enhancement of the Firefox browser add-on an amazing tool you should already be using for any kind of web development and testing. If these two aren’t already a part of your tool belt, add them today. Page Speed with Firebug is an all-around winner, providing an in-depth analysis of your website and showing both what you’ve done right and what you’ve wrong. Effectively, this gives you a checklist of improvements that you can start making right away to your website.
YSlow is Yahoo’s version of Page Speed, another enhancement to Firebug. Well, to be fair, YSlow has been around considerably longer than Page Speed — but that doesn’t necessarily make it better. At this time, which you use is largely a matter of personal preference. For me, it’s Page Speed, but part of that is based on whom I consider to have a better chance of improving the tool and integrating it with other tools (see #3) in the future. Even so, both provide important diagnostics and analysis, giving you a checklist of items to work toward improving your website. If you like YSlow’s interface better, or find it easier to understand, it will perform just as well.
3. Webmaster Tools from Google
Final word goes back to Google, who has integrated simple page speed analysis into a free service you may already use. That free service is Google’s Webmaster Tools, which shows you a number of useful things about your website and how it is crawled by Google. Once you’re set up with this service, the “Labs” section has a report called “Site performance”. This report shows how fast (or slow) your website happens to be, along with suggestions in the form of changes to your code that can help you create a faster experience for your visitors.
What If Search Engine Rankings Don’t Matter to Me?
Beyond search engine rankings, in fact the very reason behind Google’s decision, website speed is also a factor in how good of a visitor experience you’re providing. If your webpages take an eternity to load, you are likely frustrating your visitors. And they’re less likely to pick up the phone and dial your toll free number or shoot you an email for help, when they can simply go somewhere else. Like one of your competitor’s sites.
So even if you live on some planet where your websites search engine rankings don’t matter, you should still aim to optimize your page speed for the sake of your visitors.
Awesome post — really appreciate it. I implemented a few of these tips on my blog