Did you know that your blog site speed will affect your search engine rankings? Big G let us know about site speed’s role in search rankings in the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog about a year ago. From the blog post:
Like us, our users place a lot of value in speed – that’s why we’ve decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings.
That being said, it’s important for us to know our current site speed and what to do to improve it.
2 web page load time checking tool I recommend
I recommend you to use these 2 page speed tools – alone or together: Google’s Page Speed Online and Pingdom Tools
Page Speed Online
This online tool from Google Labs can help you score your site speed and give you comprehensive suggestions on how to improve your blog site speed.
As this blog post written, The Friendly Blogger scores 79 out of 100 – not bad, but plenty can be improved. Our high priority is to leverage browser caching, medium priority is to combine images into CSS sprites, and plenty of low priorities: Optimize images, minify JavaScript, etc.
Google explains that we should focus on the high priority ones as they will give the best improvement in site speed when fixed.
Pingdom Tools
Pingdom Tools is a small collection of free web tools to allow you test page load time, check DNS errors and text ping your blog. For site speed purpose, you might want to use Pingdom’s Full Page Test.
Full Page Test, in essence, is a tool to test the load time of your blog page’s elements. You can detect which elements of your page slows down your overall blog page load time and replace or update them for a faster page loading time.
All you need to do is to enter your blog URL and click “Test Now.” You will discover elements loaded in your particular blog page, such as scripts, images, etc.
As I write this blog post, The Friendly Blogger’s total load time is 3.9 seconds a couple of minutes after – not bad for a WordPress blog on a busy and crowded server.
Why you should use both tools together?
Google’s Site Speed and Pingdom’s Full Page Test complement each other. From Site Speed, we can learn what to optimize and how. From Pingdom, we can learn which elements to optimize or remove altogether.
Following the advice and results from the tools, you can definitely improve your blog speed. I recommend you to try both tools to help you find out whether you can speed up your blog and rank higher on search engines.
