Now that Google takes site speed in to to account in search rankings, as announced today and reported across the blogosphere, it has become even more important to have a well performing and optimized website.
Of course they are going to continue weighing the relevance of a page higher than site performance, but how fast or slow a site loads and responds has become a ranking factor.
Usability experts have often written about how website performance affects user satisfaction and overall opinion of the website and in many respects the business or organization who is represented by the website.
One of the quickest ways to get your site performance measurement right from the horse’s mouth is to leverage the Google Webmaster Tools (now called Google Search Console, since May 2015) toolset to see how your site is performing. Below are screenshots and basic instructions on how to do this. Note: If you do not currently have Webmaster Tools enabled for your site, you can get instructions on adding a site here. It’s a quick and simple process to do so and highly recommend as you get a plethora of useful information after its enabled and verified.
Checking your site performance in Google Webmaster Tools
- Log in to Google Webmaster Tools
- Click on the website and then go to Labs > Site performance
- Now what you will see is a performance overview at the top and below a graph of the past 6-9 months or so. Below that you get much more detailed information such as Page Speed suggestions.
It is well worth checking and subsequently optimizing your site performance using Google Webmaster Tools and other resources which are available such as the Firefox Add-on Page Speed, Yahoo’s YSlow and WebPagetest.