Do You Know Your Site's Load Speed?!
The importance of a fast loading site to your visitors and to your site's rankings with the major search engines has already been established. Google has not only announced that fact, but they've continued to provide you with resources to improve your site's overall load time. 
Google continued on that same path when they launched the much anticipated Page Speed extension for the Chrome browser this March.
Speed testing tools and add-ons are not new. The most popular over the years being WebPageTest.org. However, competition and newly updated features are always welcomed into this type of evolving field. The idea is that Google's Page Speed tests and evaluates your site based on a set of best practices.
Here's exactly how Google explains those practices:
Page Speed evaluates performance from the client point of view, typically measured as the page load time. This is the lapsed time between the moment a user requests a new page and the moment the page is fully rendered by the browser.
The best practices cover many of the steps involved in page load time, including:
- resolving DNS names,
- setting up TCP connections,
- transmitting HTTP requests,
- downloading resources,
- fetching resources from cache,
- parsing and executing scripts,
- and rendering objects on the page.
Essentially Page Speed evaluates how well your pages either eliminate these steps altogether, parallelize them, and shorten the time they take to complete.
Page Speed for Chrome has the same base engine as the Firefox add-on so it will maintain its familiarity. However, Google has added a couple new features in the Chrome version that Firefox fans will have to wait for.
The most impressive new feature is the scoring and suggestion ordering improvement that aims at helping webmasters focus on "higher-potential optimizations". Another great add...
