Testing the Speed of Your Your Website

Google has now made widely available its website speed checker which is a great tool for scoring how fast your website loads.  The speed at which your website loads is now considered a ranking factor and from the level of publicity that Google are putting behind it it seems it might be growing in importance.

Here is the Google Speed Site site to play with and of course I ran this site through it, it was crying out for me to do it.  I scored 75 and now I am looking to try and improve this.

Data as of April 6th 2011

What to Do With the Result?

Nothing really for the moment.  Don’t worry about page load speed too much.  Page load speed is just one of the many factors that Google use to rank your site.  And if you didn’t know already nobody really knows for certain the percentage weight that is put on each factor.  SEOs with a lot of experience can give you good feedback on what to concentrate on and this may get more attention when it comes down to very close competition for ranking in a very competitive niche.

What you should worry about is if your website takes an age to load or has some complex flash image that people may  get bored looking at and hit the back button.   Broadband speeds also differ in different locations and even if you love that colour rich image think about reducing the size of it or if you really like it then think of splitting it into sprites (sprites are also recommended by Google for reducing image speed loads).

You can of course have a graphic rich site that loads quickly it just takes design time to get it right.  With good design, clever CSS usage, selective typography and of course HTML5, your site load time can be improved using limited images.  But we of course all love a good picture.

Try out your site today and look at the feedback they give you.

Related posts:

1. Groundhog Website Day
2. Make Sure of Your Web Plan for This Year
3. Pay Peanuts – Get Monkeys
4. How to Get Boatloads of Traffic to Your Site (aka Kidnap the Cat)