How Fast is your Site?

If there is one thing about your site that is bound to put your potential customers off it is a slow site.

Industry standards suggest that most of us take less than 8 seconds to decide if we are going to stay on a new website or hit the back button and try a different link.

Those 8 seconds includes the time it takes your webpage to load!

So keeping that load time down to the minimum has to be one of your priorities for your webpages. Even the best web copy isn’t going to save you if the page doesn’t load fast enough for your visitor to even start to read it.

So, how do you know if your site is slow or fast? How do you find out if you have any slow problem pages?

AND once you know you have a slow page, how do you speed it up!!

Introducing Webmaster’s new Site Performance Tool.

Google just launched their new Site Performance tool. (Here’s the link to the official announcement).

This new feature is on the Labs item of your Webmaster Dashboard. See the image below

Once you click on it, you will get something that looks like this:

The new page tells you how your site is performing overall against other websites and it lists the pages that it feels need attention.

It even suggests what changes you can make to improve the performance problems on your webpages.

What’s interesting though is that I just ran it on the KKSmarts website and the main item it complained about was Google Analytics!

Either their Site Performance tool needs further tuning or Google Analytics needs some work. Either way, it’s a slightly embarrassing result for Google

Try it today and post a comment below with your results. It would be very interesting to compare results and to also see if it also complains about Analytics on your site.