Testing Your Site For Google's New Speed Ranking Factor
By Manoj Jasra
Expert Author
Article Date: 2010-04-15
The Google Webmaster blog has officially stated that page load time is now a factor in Google's ranking algorithm. Even though they state that page load time only affects less than 1% of queries, this is still 1% of 100+ billion searches a month. Below are a few tools to help you test your site's page load time more effectively.
- Page Speed, an open source Firefox/Firebug add-on that evaluates the performance of web pages and gives suggestions for improvement.
- YSlow, a free tool from Yahoo! that suggests ways to improve website speed.
- WebPagetest shows a waterfall view of your pages' load performance plus an optimization checklist.
- In Webmaster Tools, Labs > Site Performance shows the speed of your website as experienced by users around the world as in the chart below. We've also blogged about site performance.
- Pingdom Tools: Every test also shows general statistics about the loaded page such as the total number of objects, total load time, and size including all objects.
- Webpage Analyzer: Their script calculates the size of individual elements and sums up each type of web page component
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About the Author: Manoj Jasra is an online marketing veteran of almost 10 years who specializes in analytics, social/search strategy and mobile marketing. Manoj is currently a Sr. Strategist at one of Canada’s largest Telecommunications Companies, Shaw Communications Inc., where he leads Social Media, SEO, PPC and Web Analytics strategies. Manoj first started in the search marketing industry with Enquiro Search Solutions, where he spearheaded web analytics, SEO Training and the development of cutting edge search marketing solutions for clients.
Manoj is a Professional Speaker having participated at events such as Emetrics, Web Analytics Xchange, WebTrends’ Engage, Internet Marketing Conference, Social Media Innovation Summit and Search Engine Strategies. He authors Web Analytics World (a top 100 Online Marketing Blog) and consults through his firm Jasra Inc.
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