Website Optimisation – Time to Get Up to Speed?

Well it finally happened; Google came out and openly announced something webmasters had suspected for some time. They are using website speed and page load times as one of their many metrics for search rankings. This change has apparently only been rolled out across the .com variant of Google for users searching in English but it won’t be long before it’s applied across the board. While improving your sites performance will not bump you to the top of the SERPs it’s definitely something that can benefit both you and more importantly your users. So with that in mind I thought it would be helpful to pick out some tools that can help you assess your current performance with a view to making changes to improve this.

Pingdom Tools

The Pingdom Full Page Test is a great tool for checking single pages. It loads a complete html page including all files and scripts (images, css, javascript, rss, flash etc.) that would need to be loaded to view that page in a browser.  It generates a report of the loading time of the files needed as well as the order that they are loaded and their size.

This is great for identifying slow loading internal files or external scripts but does not provide any recommendations on performance issues or how to improve performance so it leaves the analysis to you but you’re not scared of a little work are you?

YSlow

YSlow is an extension to Firebug which is an add-on for Firefox that can aid you in your performance optimisation efforts. It gives the page you have open in your browser a score from A to F that is based on Yahoo’s performance rules. This tool was used by Yahoo internally and has been available for some time now.

You get a list of 22 criteria that YSLow analyses and you can click on any of these to see a breakdown of the tools findings and an explanation of the score. Each of the 22 criteria is linked to documentation on that rule and contains information on how to improve your performance in that area.

There is also a tab within YSlow called tools, this tab has a list of programs and tools that can be used to improve loading times. They range from css compressors to image compressors as well as javascript and css minimisation.

Google Webmaster Tools

Whilst Google Webmaster Tools is very basic and provides very limited information it can give you a great idea of whether you are heading in the right direction with your optimisation efforts.

The graph format makes it easy to get a grasp of whether the changes you’ve made are having a positive impact on loading times. I would also expect there to be an upgrade to this area of webmaster tools coming soon. With site performance becoming more important it would make sense that Google would give webmasters and site owners more stats and information to allow them to make improvements.

I personally feel that the sooner Google employs the performance factor across the rest of their data centres the better, because it will be the users who benefit. In the extremely competitive world of search engine optimisation companies and site owners will use every trick in their arsenal to improve their rankings and if a new algorithmic metric of site performance is introduced then optimisation will occur and faster sites make for happier users.