I am using YSlow firefox plugin to rate site page speed. Along with the rate, areas that cause the low speed are also given and rate and explained very well why it is causing the delay on the load. YSlow is an extended tool for FireBug.
Mine was at 87, on Pagespeed 1.7. After an upgrade to 1.8 it bounces between 78-80. When I first installed it months and months ago, the site was a 68. Ugh. Sweet tool though.
Although the tools helps, Google does use user data. So if your users have a 1mbit connection, your website is going to seem slow to your users. Using the Page Speed tool, minify, cache and so I my score went from 82 to 94. Just can't get it to 100 Also because ads are running that use javascript that cannot be combined with my js. Also because of the use of Adsense and Analytics there are 4 google JS files that are not optimized. Google should start using page speed, because their own scores are not that high. Google.com = 94 (practicably empty page!) Youtube = 84 Blogger = 82
I get between 88 and 91 for the pages on one of my sites (static HTML) and also GWMTs says... "On average, pages in your site take 1.9 seconds to load (updated on Aug 31, 2010). This is faster than 71% of sites. These estimates are of high accuracy (more than 1000 data points)." The tool highlights any problems and in some cases does the work for you... like for my site, if I click on the "Minify HTML" it shows the reduction percentage if I minify the code, and even shows/gives the minified code via the "See optimized version or Save as" links. Cheers James
Strangly GWMT has not updated any page performance since Aug 31, 2010. Normally they update it every 2 to 4 days.
91, and don't know why .. my site load less that 1 second , my sites hosted on my own vps I think this tool is not working accurately
If you are interested in speeding up your webpages, I highly recommend the YSlow Firefox plugin from Yahoo. It will show you all of the components on your web pages, how they are cached, and has a list of suggestions and tools to make it faster. Smushit, which makes images smaller, is particularly impressive.
My article pages are 80/100 but the my home page is 90/100. I think my articles have lower scores because there is so much more to load with the comment forms. Yay, more optimization.