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Tuesday, February 8, 2011

Google Site Performance - Site Page Speed Tool

New Toy! Yea. Google now has as part of their webmaster tools a site performance page loading speed estimator that looks at a random selection of pages on your site and averages the load speed. This provides you a quick and dirty look at any load delays or issues you may on your site. Thanks again Google for a quick and simple tool that is free and highly useful. Yet I must point out that even though I use Google webmasters tools often, this feature was pointed out to me by my friend Leroy and his site http://www.interfacebus.com/ .

The site performance page speed tool, according to Google's webmaster tools, Free Class Notes Online averages 2.8 seconds to load as of the last update on January 26 of this year. This is faster then 53 percent of sites out there. The index or home page averages a load time of 1.7 seconds.

While on my other site, Resume Advantage Pro, the average load time is 2.6 seconds across the entire web site, 56 percent better then other sites, with the home page or index page loading in 2.1 seconds. This is fantastic because this index page is full of resume writing and free career advice articles and tips that are continually updated. I believe part of the good performance numbers comes from using Wordpress as my CMS which is optimized well.

3 comments:

  1. Correction; The speed tool looks at all your pages, based on visitors that use the Google tool bar. It then averages those numbers based on how often a page is viewed [from a person using the tool bar]. So higher traffic pages count more than lower traffic pages in the speed score. If a person with a tool bar never visits a particular page, that page is not counted in the average.

    So the speed tool 'site performance' only counts toward visitors using the tool bar. Your site speed may appear faster or slower depending on how that user reaches you site, i.e. a modem or T1 connection. For example most people reaching my site are using a DSL or higher connection, but I can't tell what percent of the visitors [that use the Google tool bar] are on a T1 or dialup connection.

    The example pages Google provides for corrections or speed enhancements seem to be random.

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  2. I more comment, as of a few months ago Google has indicated that they now rank pages based on speed [loading time]. Google indicates that it counts for very little, and it is but one of the 200 things they look at when ranking a page ~ but they do look at it.

    I have been adjusting my pages for months and have seen little or now improvement in my numbers, maybe 2 tenths of a second. But if those visitors are using dialup from some weird location, I might never see an improvement.

    On the flip side any time I update a page, maybe reduce the html, I'm always adding more content making the page larger than it was [slowing it down].

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  3. Leroy. Great comments, thanks! Also, a few years back Google started to weight the quality of backlinks to a site which each year that passes, Google get's more data to improve this quality ranking. Basically, take your site, all about engineeering, electronics, signals and interfaces. If a fourm or site links to you that is from a related topic, that counts higher then if a totally unrelated site links to you. People have been saying for the last few years now that they have seen their page rank drop a bit, and the talk out there is this is one of the bigger factors.

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