How Can Google Know My Page Speed? -The Website Speed Quick Fix

How Can Google Know My Page Speed?

But first, it is vital that one understand the basics of how Google's algorithm determines your website speed and thus your SERP ranking. The search engine uses two main factors when it comes to speed assessment. First, your website will receive a higher speed ranking if it responds faster to Googlebot. Googlebot is the web crawling tool used by Google to find and index websites. Second, your website will also receive a good speed ranking if it records a faster loading time on Google Toolbar than your competition. To better assist you in analyzing your website speed, Google has added a page speed report to their webmasters tools found within the Google webmasters 'lab' section.

You can use the tool and its report to see you how fast your website loads as compared to other websites. Once you are armed with the information of where you page ranks in the speed hierarchy, you can start to make the necessary code and structure changes to make it respond faster. You first priority should be to make sure you have no SLOW pages on your site. Page that take two seconds or more to load and pages that are marked as SLOW in the Google Webmaster Tools need to be improved to avoid a Google penalty for your website speed.

The when you have made sure to improve all slow pages go on to make all of your pages load in one seconds or less. Read on to see why this is important. Having a websites that loads fast has more benefits than just higher search engine ranking and avoiding a Google penalty. A website optimized for speed reduces the bandwidth required on your hosting service thus reducing your overall hosting costs. Faster websites also give a better browsing experience as users are able to get information faster as they can navigate through your website easily.

Further, websites optimized for speed work better when accessed on a mobile phones, PDAs and other devices that do not have the same level of processing memory as your standard laptop or desktop computer. Even though you can have a mobile version of your website, usually this comes with trimmed down graphics and other aspects of your site. Some users will want to view your site in full HTML on their phone or PDA and a faster loading website will have better chances of successfully loading on such devices. As a webmaster, there are a number of free tools that you can use to increase the loading speed of your website. I have listed two of the more popular ones below:

Page Speed

Page Speed is an open-source add-on for Mozilla Firefox browser. It evaluates the speed of your website and gives you suggestions on how to improve your website speed. Page Speed runs tests on the architectural configuration of both your web server and your website's front end code. After running these tests, it gives you a report on your website speed and suggestions on how to improve the speed of your website.

Yslow

Yslow is a free software by Yahoo. It analyzes the performance of your website and gives you suggestions on how to improve the speed of your website. Yslow is a Firefox add-on and is integrated with the Firebug software for website development. It displays statistics and an evaluation report. It also gives you suggestions on how best to improve the speeds of your website using best practices. Yslow comes integrated with other tools for performance evaluation including Smush.it and JSLint to further enhance your website performance. Even though it is a Yahoo product, Yslow can help you avoid the Google penalty on website speed.

The Website Speed Quick Fix

There's a lot of factors affecting website and many of them are technical in nature and are best solved by a good web developer or webmaster. There a few simple thing you can do yourself, even if you're not a tech person but you have some experience making webpages.

Reduce the number, size and quality of images and reduce usage of audio, flash and javascript. Reduce the length of the page by splitting a long page into several short. Remove redundant HTML, CSS and Javascript code from the page source code. Don't use images and other components that are linked live from other domains, instead use a copy on your own server. And make sure to keep an eye on the Google Webmaster Tools to see how your site compares to your competition.