Google has officially announced at their webmaster blog (which, by the way, if you have not subscribed to you really should) that website speed will now be one of the parameters included in their ranking algorithm. There have been rumors about this for some time, and now it has been confirmed. All though Google does confirm that less than one percent of all websites will be affected by this it is still important to make sure and check your sites load times and speed, and especially for the visitors. Slow loading websites drive visitors away and therefore can result in loss of revenue, click throughs and conversions.
Most of the time it is very easy to check your website speed and load times as there are a variety of free tools that can help you to do that, as well as offer fixes and suggestions for fixing site speed and load time issues.
Page Speed Plugin for WordPress
Check out WP Super Cache plugin, it’s a great plugin that helps to dramatically increase website speed and load times regardless of how many social bookmark buttons, plugins, badges and other add-ons that are notorious for making blogs drag you may have on your blogs. This plugin really works, and makes all blogs load much faster.
Free Tools To Check And Fix Website Speed
You can always use your Google Webmaster Tools account to check website speed, just Go to Labs then Site Performance and see a graph of your site’s speed performance. And, check out some of these great free webmaster tools to fix load times and make your websites faster.
- Page Speed – As previously mentioned in Free Website To Tool To Analyze and Fix Load Times, this is a very effective free Firefox/Firebug add-on that analyzes and offers fixes for website speed issues.
- WebPagetest – Offers a neat display of website pages load times and a comparison against an optimization checklist.
- IntroSpectrum – This one provides simulation to mirror actual user experiences on your site in various web browsers.
- YSlow
- AOL Page Test
- BrowserMob – Provides alerts and monitoring.
Also check out more free tools to analyze website performance at Google Tools To Make Websites Faster.
More Webmaster Resources
- Free Website Tool To Analyze and Fix Load Times
- 12 Free Backlink Checkers – Free SEO Tools
- Free Website Analysis Tools
- 4 Free SERP Checker Tools to Check Keyword Rankings
- How To Analyze Competitors Backlinks
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Thanks for a lot of useful information. I never thought about subscribing to the Webmaster Blog but thanks to this post I just did. I’m new to the SEO game and it helps when I come across information I can actually understand.
Shirley Kelly´s last blog ..BP Oil Spill in the Gulf of Mexico
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