Speed speed this is on every bloggers lips of late as Google formally announce that page speed will now be a factor in the ranking of website that means the faster your page loads the better you will fair off in the search engine results pages.for those who follow this blog will remember that not so long ago i wrote a post about web design page speed. So are you keeping up to date with this? I asked the question is your website up to speed? what steps are you taking to ensure that your blog or website is loading quickly?
For me this does not comes as a surprise because of Google’s philosophy which states that “Take care of the users experience and the rest will follow” well there you have it guys. There are lots of tools available for you to use and check your website loading time and webmasters and web designers alike you too should play your role in educing the size of your web pages by compressing JavaScript files,optimizing your cascading style sheets, reduce the number of database calls and optimizing or reducing the size of your images.
Looking for help if you do a Google search then you will find some very useful and handy tools that are free which you can use to test the loading time of your website some of the popular ones are firebug Yslow and sitting in Google’s arsenals of webmaster tools is one called Speed Tracer.If you think that your website is not loading fast enough then by all means install Speed Tracer which is an extension for Google chrome the developers’ version.
Using Speed Tracer
First and foremost you need to get the developers’ version of chrome after downloading it you need to follow the instruction to make the switch this will then install Speed Tracer as an extension to chrome you can download from https://code.google.com/webtoolkit/speedtracer/ and follow the instruction.Once install you will see the Speed Tracer icon next to the address bar.Now there you have website loading time is something we all need to look at as website owners and bloggers what do you think is this important or should you ignore it? the answer for me is no getting it right takes time but you should not ignore it after all it is your blog your business you need to look after it. Now share with me what tools you use to check your website speed is Speed Tracer of any good to us or is it too complicated. Thanks for reading this far now share your views.
This is something that I just started working on. I found that some of the plug-ins that I was using was slowing the load time so I disabled them and it made a big difference. One of the plug-ins that caused the biggest slow down was the Featured Content Gallery. It looks great on the index page but it’s a resource hog. 🙂
There are still a few tweaks that I need to make and I’m going to install one of the WP caching plug-ins. I just checked my load time and it came up in 1.2 s.
Not only do slow loading pages cause a drop in rankings but many visitors are turned off by a slow loading site and will move on to another site.
You are right Robert plugins are great and very handy but they sometimes uses lots of resources and we as bloggers have to decide to keep them or not i also deactivate a few and is looking at the others.
With Google going to update PR soon 🙂 blog speed is a matter of concern.
I use pingdom.com to check my blog speed and have installed a plugin to speed up my blog.
Will check on speedtracer 🙂
Thanks for your comment Shabnam i am aware of pingdom but never uses it will have a look and give it a go. Thanks for the heads up
I have never used any tools to check my page load time except checking it using Woorank (a site analyzer). One thing I try to do is reduce the number of plugins used and i also use a cache plugin to increase the site speed.
I did use wp cache plugin but i had to deactivate it for advertisers reason because it was giving wrong information and in conflict with the script.
Nice and very useful post. I agree page load speed is very important and this is not only about the Google page rank but it is more about the user experience. Nobody would like to spend his/her time on a site which does not load fast or say, better than the most others. I would like to put here again the same thing – KISS…Keep it simple and stupid. Simplicity is what is required from the sites. It really sucks to see blogs with too many ads and unnecessary widgets. It never helps instead makes it looks worse by increasing the page load time and thus creating a negative user experience. I did realize it later and now, I have cleaned up my blog. Removed many unnecessary widgets and codes. Hope it looks better and May Google is impressed 😀
You are right by saying the unnecessary widgets Aswani these helps put more pressure on the servers those increasing the time the page takes to load and like that keep it simple and stupid. Thanks for your valuable comments
Great article Gary. Currently I’m using a cool service called gtmetrix.com, Speed Tracer for Chrome, and Page Speed for Fireforx to measuring how quickly my web pages load.
Thanks nicola will check that tool you mentioned never used that one before thanks for the heads up
Cool article bro,optimizing page’s speed is vital one,i agree with you and thanx fro sharing
I didn’t know that speed is a factor now. Thanks for the information. I guess Google wants everything to be the best. No one wants to wait too long for something, right?
That is the first I have heard of Speed Tracer. Nice tip. I just recently installed WP-Super Cache to help speed up my page loads. They were taking way too long with all the plugins that I have installed.
That seems a great tool to know how fast does your website loads. Speeding up the loading of your website is really important even before Google announced that they will include it in their algo, you have to think of the welfare of your visitors.
I would also like to tell that there some part in your comment form that the text I’m typing is fading. I’m just concern with your web design.
i never hear about page speed process.its really more helpful for me & others those who are worrying about their page speed.thanks for sharing with this great tool
It is very important that your blog does not take much time to load while a user request for it. This to will definitely help to know the webpage speed. By which you can make some changes to your page to increase its speed.
This is really a very informative post. I like the way you have explained about the importance of our business website. It is very important to have a website to grow our business world wide. Thank you for sharing such an valuable post.
I didn’t know that the speed of loading affects on SERP. It is time to go to the fastest server) and use only HTML + CSS) webpage will be loaded in milliseconds.)
Speed speed this is on every bloggers lips of late as Google formally announce that page speed will now be a factor in the ranking of website that means the faster your page loads the better you will fair off in the search engine results pages.