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Webmaster Tools Site Performance – A New Cool Tool

By Robert Campbell on Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009 Print This Post
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Google’s Webmaster Tools unleashed a pretty cool tool today to help you improve your websites load time. The tool is called Site Performance, located under the labs portion in the Webmaster Tools.

Looking at my own graph, it appears they have been tracking average load times since the end of July. For this site, the average load time is 2.4 seconds. Something I’m pretty happy about, but wouldn’t mind finding a way to bring it even lower.

What Site Performance Reports

The tool first graphs the average loads times for you, and then lists a few example pages with their load times. It then lists some of the trouble makers that could use some help, and also includes the suggested methods on how you can speed each page up.

screenshot of webmaster tools site performance

At the footer of this page you will also find a Firebug add-on so you can diagnose page speed on the fly. Here is the download page for this tool:

Download page for Google’s Page Speed: Install Page Speed

You only have a few seconds to gain a visitors attention. Do you want them to spend it waiting? Google found my site to average 2.4 seconds to load. What’s yours?

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10 Comments on “Webmaster Tools Site Performance – A New Cool Tool”

  1. oes tsetnoc says:

    I have also notice this new tool.. but i am still confuse how to make site speed best

  2. hospitalera says:

    Thanks a bunch for this one, I was looking for something like this for ages! Unfortunately my site is loading slow, so time to get rid of a few things, especially considered that page load speed is a determinating factor for Google to decide how many pages to index! SY

    • Hi,

      You are very right about Google indexing speed. It seems like more and more the needs of the visitor are matching a search engines needs.

      Is a site to slow for an impatient user? If it is, it may be to slow for search engines as well. There should be no excuses for load speed if you ask me, unless of course you are suffering from a swarm of digg users that day.

  3. freelancer says:

    just took a quick look at it, not sure how accurate it is since it’s kinda off with the “Crawl stats” reports

    • Google’s Webmaster Tools has always seemed a bit slow for me in regards to relaying data. This is the second function they have recently added to it though, so maybe they are starting to put more effort into it.

      Here is what I use when do an analysis for clients: http://tools.pingdom.com/ It doesn’t offer suggested ways to improve speeds, but it does break down everything on a web page so you can see where the problem areas are.

  4. Great article ;) Thank you so much.

  5. well, you can actually download a plugin called firbugg to test your website performance .. it’s better than waiting 24 hours till google decides to show you the analytics.

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