Google Adds Site Performance Speed Testing Tool

There’s been a lot of discussion lately about how important a role load times and website speed play in search results.

Found via Mr. K, Google has announced the launch of a new tool to track how Google views your website, ecommerce site or blog from a loading perspective. The tool is available within the Google Labs section of the Google Webmaster Tools service. The tool is called “Site Performance” and actually displays some interesting information.

Google notes, “Studies have repeatedly shown that speeding up your site leads to increased user retention and activity, higher revenue and lower costs. Towards the goal of making every webpage load as fast as flipping the pages of a magazine, we have provided articles on best practices, active discussion forums and many tools to diagnose and fix speed issues.”

The tool shows you how long it takes Google to load your pages and includes the details on total size, number of requests and domain lookups.

As the announcement post notes, the tool also shows you example pages and edits you could make to have the page load faster. In my tests, it says I should:

• combine CSS
• reduce domain lookups
• Enable gzip compression
• serve resources from a consistent URL

Give the tool a try and leave a comment with the suggestions the Site Performance tool suggests for your website.