Are Your Site Pages Up To (Google) Speed?

You don’t need an SEO charging you an arm and a leg telling you a broken site isn’t much use when it comes to SEO. I’ve yet to come across anybody who doesn’t grasp this particular concept.

But a broken site can take on various forms:

• Bad Coding: Scripts, html or CSS that don’t play nicely with your browser can lead to some eternal spinning wheels of death or some jauntily displayed pages.
• Hosting Problems: Servers, DNS or other backend issues that make your site slower than Donald Trump’s hairpiece trying to swim through molasses or stop it from working altogether.

But, more often than not, your server can still be overloaded due to dodgy scripts or some errant code.

And these days, with Google boasting page speed as a ranking factor, it’s even more vital; although, there surely can’t be anything less search engine or less user friendly than a site that loads slowly or not at all.

Y’know, that can’t be used.

So, I present to you Google’s new Online Page Speed Analyzer: http://pagespeed.googlelabs.com/

Page Speed evaluates performance from the client point of view, typically measured as the page load time. This is the lapsed time between the moment a user requests a new page and the moment the page is fully rendered by the browser. The best practices cover many of the steps involved in page load time, including resolving DNS names, setting up TCP connections, transmitting HTTP requests, downloading resources, fetching resources from cache, parsing and executing scripts, and rendering objects on the page. Essentially Page Speed evaluates how well your pages either eliminate these steps altogether, parallelize them, and shorten the time they take to complete. The best practices are grouped into six categories that cover different aspects of page load optimization:

• Optimizing caching — keeping your application’s data and logic off the network altogether
• Minimizing round-trip times — reducing the number of serial request-response cycles
• Minimizing request overhead — reducing upload size
• Minimizing payload size — reducing the size of responses, downloads, and cached pages
• Optimizing browser rendering — improving the browser’s layout of a page
• Optimizing for mobile — tuning a site for the characteristics of mobile networks and mobile devices

Learn more about Google’s Page Speed best practices then go and see how your site fares.

To get more information on the topic of website speed, we have multiple resources for you to check out.

• Are Your Site Pages Up To (Google) Speed?
• Core Web Vitals Update: It’s Coming (Eventually)
• How To Tell If Your Website Load Times Are Hurting Your Business
• How To Crush Your Unminified JavaScript And CSS Issues In Site Audits
• Which Site Speed Tool is Better? Google PageSpeed Insights vs Pingdom

Or, if you’d rather just speak to someone, you’re welcome to contact us today for a free consultation or learn more about our status as a Google Premier Partner before you reach out.