17.12.2013: Edit and review – glad to know the Page Speed Online service is still there and useful.
Awake at silly o’clock this morning thanks to a child’s nightmare, and having given up trying to get back to sleep, I spot a tweet from Google’s Matt Cutts about the new Page Speed Online service that analyses a web page’s performance and then offers suggestions to make it faster. Google announced this yesterday on their Webmaster Central Blog – always worth keeping an eye on. BarbaraSaul.com gets a reasonable 87 out of 100 but there are few plugins and graphics to slow it all down.
We all know that how fast a website loads makes a difference, not only to how Google considers the worthiness of your site, but more importantly in whether your visitor will bother hanging around for it to load. This may be less of a problem, generally, with faster broadband speeds all the time (well perhaps not for rural folk) but still needs to be considered as a priority.
So what will you get? It’s actually less daunting than we might fear. A list of suggestions are offered and the thing to do is give it a go and see what Google suggests, but do not panic.
My top priority was to enable Keep-Alive – that’s a server thing and I chatted with our hosting geeks about this before rushing to change things that may impact other areas.
There will be a variety of suggestions, most of which will be gobbledy-gook to many of us – the thing to do is run them by your website geek/designer and see what they have to say about it all. With WordPress sites, it’s likely that an over-abundance of plugins will affect the page speed – it’s most often the cause for slowing things down, but there may well be relative straightforward things that can be done to make a difference.
We’re certainly going to use this tool often, for all the sites we work with, our own included!
What do you think of such tools? TMI or useful for your overall strategy?
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