Page Speed

Faster loading pages means happier search engine and happier users

These days, speed matters. Why?

Search Engines want to provide their users with high quality websites. High quality websites don’t make their users wait for content.
Your readers don’t want to wait for your content. Do not annoy them.
Just like in any race, speed provides a competitive edge

So how slow or fast is my website?

You can use the following tools to gain a picture of your website’s speed. However, some caveats:

If you are a beginner, do not be discouraged. For example, these tools will recommend using a CDN. You will get confused and frustrated that you really, really need one (which you might, but at first, don’t worry about it).
New lingo. You will be introduced to some web techie lingo that you have avoided up to this point.
The pressure you feel that your task list has just expanded. Chill. Relax. One step at a time.

There are four main tools you can use to assess your website’s speed.

First, in order to get a big picture view of your site’s speed, log into your Google Webmaster’s Tools account. If you don’t have one, get one.

On the left menu, under Labs, Choose Site Performance. You should see a handy dandy image like the one below:

From this graph, you will be able to get a sense of how fast your pages load. As you can see, the graph deals in seconds and sets a goal of 1.5 seconds.

To get another big picture view of your website, head over to WebsiteOptimization.com. You will a boatload of helpful information, as well as a Web Page Analyzer. The web page analyzer will assess the following criteria:

TOTAL_HTML
TOTAL_OBJECTS
TOTAL_IMAGES
TOTAL_CSS
TOTAL_SIZE
TOTAL_SCRIPT
HTML_SIZE
IMAGES_SIZE
SCRIPT_SIZE
CSS_SIZE
MULTIM_SIZE

The tool estimate total download time and gives you a picture of page speed. It also provides feedback on each of those criteria and whether the web page met their standards.
Finally, there are two tools that really get down to business and will help you make changes that can benefit your site.

Page Speed is Google’s own speed assessment tool. It is available as an addon for Firefox and Chrome or there is an online version you can use.

Page Speed reports back a value X out of 100. 100 out of 100 is the best. Frankly, it maybe difficult to get there depending on the tools you have at your disposable to make your website faster. Items Page Speed Considers in assessing your speed:

Avoid bad requests
Avoid CSS @import
Avoid CSS expressions
Avoid document.write
Combine external CSS
Combine external JavaScript
Combine images using CSS sprites
Defer loading of JavaScript
Defer parsing of JavaScript
Enable compression
Leverage browser caching
Leverage proxy caching
Make landing page redirects cacheable
Minify CSS
Minify HTML
Minify JavaScript
Minimize request size
Minimize DNS lookups
Minimize redirects
Optimize images
Optimize the order of styles and scripts
Parallelize downloads across hostnames
Prefer asynchronous resources
Put CSS in the document head
Remove unused CSS
Serve resources from a consistent URL
Serve scaled images
Serve static content from a cookieless domain
Specify a character set
Specify image dimensions
Use efficient CSS selectors

I am not going to take the time to explain each one of those items here. However, the list gives you a picture of the kind of things the tool will be looking for. For most of you, your eyes are glazing over at this moment. For now, just install Page Speed, run it against your home page and see the results. At that point, you can begin to dig into the nitty gritty.

Similar to Page Speed, is Yahoo’s YSlow. YSlow actually gives your website a letter grade: A, B, C, etc. This tool is a harsher critic in my opinion. It looks at the following criteria: