The speed of your site, or the amount of time it takes your pages to load, is one of the many important factors to consider when developing websites.
With the release of Google’s new tool Site Performance, available within your webmaster tools account, I thought it would be a good time to provide a few resources that you can use to ensure your sites speed is up to par – the following are five tools I have found particularly useful.
Google Webmaster Tools’ Site Performance
Site Performance is an experimental Webmaster Tools Labs feature that shows you latency information about your site. It shows you the average page load time for pages in your site, the trend over the last few months, and some suggestions on how to make the pages load faster.
Google 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.
Yahoo! YSlow
YSlow analyzes web pages and suggests ways to improve their performance based on a set of rules for high performance web pages. YSlow is a Firefox add-on integrated with the Firebug web development tool.
Pingdom Tools – Full Page Test
The Full Page Test loads a complete HTML page including all objects (images, CSS, JavaScripts, RSS, Flash and frames/iframes) – it mimics the way a page is loaded in a web browser. Every test also shows general statistics about the loaded page such as the total number of objects, total load time, and size including all objects.
WebSiteOptimization.com Analysis Tool
The script calculates the size of individual elements and sums up each type of web page component. Based on these page characteristics the script then offers advice on how to improve page load time.
Looking for some more information, check out Google’s tutorials and resources to help make web faster.
Have a resource that you use to measure and improve your sites speed? Please feel free to share with a comment!
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