What is Page Speed and How Can you Benefit?
What is Page Speed?
Page Speed is an open-source Firefox/Firebug Add-on. Webmasters and web developers can use Page Speed to evaluate the performance of their web pages and to get suggestions on how to improve them. Google has created a Web site for developers that is focused exclusively on making Web applications, sites and browsers faster.
By offering tutorials, tips and performance tools via the new site, Google wants to help make the Web faster by assembling a community of developers interested in online speed and performance.
Google has maintained for years that the performance of Web sites and applications is extremely important to the company, which developed Chrome in large part because it wasn’t satisfied with existing browser technology in this area.
How does Page Speed work?
Page Speed performs several tests on a site’s web server configuration and front-end code. These tests are based on a set of best practices known to enhance web page performance. Webmasters who run Page Speed on their pages get a set of scores for each page, as well as helpful suggestions on how to improve its performance.
Why should you use Page Speed?
By using Page Speed, you can:
* Make your site faster.
* Keep Internet users engaged with your site.
* Reduce your bandwidth and hosting costs.
* Improve the web!
Is speed more important than relevance?
Page Speed
Getting started visit the Google Web Speed site:
1. Install Page Speed.
2. Run Page Speed against your web pages.
3. Read about the Page Speed performance best practices.
Nice blog. But I’ve found that the Google performance in the webmasters tools doesn’t relate to the actual times it takes to load pages or the Google page speed tool
I have some pages, which in reality take less than 0.5 seconds to load, they have Google page speed scores of 99, and are very performance optimised. Yet, when I check the performance in the Google webmasters tools I’m told
“on average, pages in your site take 5.4 seconds to load (updated on Mar 13, 2010). This is slower than 76% of sites.”
This is a lie, even on a bad day, none of my pages take that long to load!
Is there something additional that Google performance in the webmaster tools is gathering that I don’t know about?
Mike22,
Great point and a great question. I think its worthy of asking the question directly. Stay tuned…