Are You Fast Enough?

Website Speed

Is your website up to speed? Not just regarding data and communications, but actual speed. How fast does it load, how long does it take to navigate from page to page? We as Americans are known for our love of speed; fast food, high-speed internet, speed pass lanes at amusement parks, moving walkways. So it’s no surprise that Google has now taken site speed into account for their ranking system. While it doesn’t hold as much weight as relevance, it’s still something to keep in mind.

Google listed a few web sources to help you evaluate your web speed, from their blog:

Page Speed, an open source Firefox/Firebug add-on that evaluates the performance of web pages and gives suggestions for improvement.
YSlow, a free tool from Yahoo! that suggests ways to improve website speed.
WebPagetest shows a waterfall view of your pages’ load performance plus an optimization checklist.
In Webmaster Tools, Labs > Site Performance shows the speed of your website as experienced by users around the world as in the chart below.
Many other tools on code.google.com/speed.

So is your website up to speed? If not, a simple update could get you a higher Google ranking and help you show up more frequently in Google searches. Something to think about. Google’s own blog post ha more information if you want to learn more.Contact us if you have questions about your website.

Off you go Speedy Gonzales.