John Borkowski, July 28, 2011
a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-0JBJrwpf500/TjGUyYcZW9I/AAAAAAAAAIg/uBcKhsP7IMs/s1600/Page%2BLoad%2BSpeed.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}">
Website page load speed is a critical element to online rankings and search engine optimization. SEO experts and teams have several different methods of decreasing page load speed by decreasing the amount of HTTP requests (server requests) and RTT (Round Trip Time) back and forth between a site and its server. In addition, understanding parallelization (ordering JS/CSS correctly) and making these scripts external instead of inline are recommended.
This tool can evaluate and prioritize your sites:
- Browser Caching
- Expire Headers
- Javascript
- CSS Sprites
- Image Optimization
- Parallelization
- Server Requests
And many more On-Site Optimization (Page Load Related) strategies.
The tool is generally limitied in relation to YSlow but is directly tied in with Webmaster Tools. Whats more impressive is the WebPageTest.com evaluation which compares quite well against YSlow, including a waterfall evaluation similar to YSlows DOM.
Their Page Speed Service sounds complicated, but it seems to be rather simple for the end-user. “Page Speed Service fetches content from your servers, rewrites your pages by applying web performance best practices and serves them to end users via Google's servers across the globe.”
Although this is a step toward optimizing a webpage and helping its online visibility on search engine results pages, it doesn’t suffice for a fully integrated SEO campaign. There are many more methods that come in to play, although this is a small step in the right direction.
