The Need for Speed

How fast your website displays in a visitors’ browser is very important. An MIT Technology Review article stated that 49% of users abandon a site or switch to a competitor after experiencing performance issues. If it takes too long for your site to load in a browser, visitors will go elsewhere.

Google Page Speed is a free tool that analyzes the content of a web page and then generates suggestions to make that page load faster. Reducing page load times will reduce the number of people who leave your site early and increase conversion rates.

You simply enter the webpage URL. Page Speed Online fetches that page’s contents (HTML, JavaScript, CSS, images, etc.) using a webkit-based renderer. It runs a number of diagnostic tests against a web page, and analyzes the page’s performance using a number of “rules” known to speed up page load time.

The rules are based on general principles of web page performance, including resource caching, data upload and download size, and client-server round-trip times. They examine factors such as web server configuration, JavaScript and CSS code, image file properties, and so on.

Page Speed provides an overall score between 0 and 100. In addition, it also provides a general score for each rule, using a simple red-yellow-green grading scheme.

Specific suggestions and techniques for correctly implementing each rule are also displayed. It also provides some automatic optimization of external resources included on a page, such as minifying JavaScript code and compressing images.

Google Page Speed Online
www.pagespeed.googlelabs.com