Did everyone notice the new Site Performance feature in Google WMT Labs? I just noticed it last night, so I did a little research and whipped out a quick post on it. Pretty cool info. Like a lot of the other WMT, it's somewhat basic. But the use of the Page Speed tool output for evaluating pages and giving suggestions of how to speed up load times is pretty cool. I think it shows the importance that Google is starting to place on site performance. If nothing else, it is a way to improve the user experience and make crawling more efficient. If pages download faster then Google can crawl more pages in a shorter period of time. I also believe it is in preparation for Caffeine which likely already is considering page load times in their ranking algorithm. I was at Pubcon a couple of weeks ago when Cutts announce there were lots of people at Google lobbying to include page load times as a ranking factor. Although he made it sound like they were only "considering" it at the moment, I think it's just his way of easing everyone into getting used to the idea because it's likely already in the Caffeine algo. Anyway... Just wanted to notify those who didn't already know about the new feature.
This is a great feature and while Google has announced that page load time will be a important factor in rankings of site, it is really helpful for webmasters. When I checked one of my site it is showing some problems with load time and some possible suggestions such as minimizing DNS lookup and gzip compression. Can you please elaborate these things and how important these are as your blogpost don't have any specific explanations about this.
It is a great feature. I only wish you could force it to check again, on demand, rather than waiting for it to update again at it's regularly scheduled time. Also, it doesn't seem to like it's own analytics code. I have this on every page of my suggested way to optimize.
Gzip compression is pretty easy to activate. In your .htaccess file just add this line... php_flag zlib.output_compression On PHP:
I think there was another thread on this in the google section, Well the new feaature that has been added is a great one.