14 DAY TRIAL // Google's obsession with speed is notorious and it's evident in all of its products from the homepage to Chrome. And it's not satisfied with making its own sites faster, it wants all the web to be faster. Google already has several projects focusing on this as well and is now launching a new tool for webmasters to provide them with rather detailed stats on the performance of their own sites.
“We've just launched Site Performance, an experimental feature in Webmaster Tools that shows you information about the speed of your site and suggestions for making it faster,” Sreeram Ramachandran, software engineer, and Arvind Jain, director, Faster Web program wrote. “This is a small step in our larger effort to make the web faster. Studies have repeatedly shown that speeding up your site leads to increased user retention and activity, higher revenue and lower costs.”
Google Site Performance is available in the Labs section of the tools. It shows webmasters the load speed of their sites and how it changed over time, but also how they compare to other sites, as well as examples of other pages and their load times. The point is to give website owners an accurate image of how their site performs and how it stacks up to other similar sites in order to help them improve it.
In that sense, the new tool also has Page Speed suggestions below the charts. Page Speed is a Firefox and Firebug add-on designed by Google to measure a site's responsiveness but also help debug problems with the load times and suggest ways of improving them. Google gathers the data for Site Performance from Google Toolbar users so, especially for smaller sites, it may not be completely accurate or representative.
In fact, Google only shows the stats if it has enough data on the site to prevent just such a problem. Also, the numbers are an average of the load times of the users around the world and they are bound to vary in the real world. With speed becoming a raking factor in Google Search results next year, the tools should come in handy for webmasters wanting to ensure a good standing.
