Use Page Speed To Test And Improve Your Site’s Speed

Recently Google researched the effect that an increase in a page’s loading time has over its visitors. They concluded that even an increase as little as 300ms has a significant impact on the user’s browsing behavior. In the 6-week experiment, 0.2 to 0.6% less searches were performed as a result of the .3 second increase in the loading time of the search results.

Even more recently (April 2010), Google decided to take into consideration a site’s loading time in its search algorithm. Thus, the loading speed of the website now influences its position in search engine results, at least in Google, and by a little bit.

In an effort to speed up the Internet, Google published an open-source Firefox Add-on that hooks up into Firebug. This add-on will measure your page’s speed and give it a score of 0 to 100. It will also indicate what optimization should be done to the website’s code and to the server hosting the website, in order to shorten the loading time.

You can install Page Speed in your Firefox browser by going to code.google.com.