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
Nice blog post and Pingdom tools are one of many great products out there. Can’t over-egg enough the importance of speed testing – not only from an SEO perspective but from a user experience.
Nice alternative is StatusCake.com’s tool which allows you to simply enter the URL and then chose the location you want the website to be tested from. Quick, easy-to-use and free! 🙂 https://www.statuscake.com/tools/
Thanks for the alternative tool!