Comments on: Tools to Speed Up Your Site – Ready for 2010

By: webtalent seo

webtalent seo — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 02:20:43 +0000

Google webmaster tools is a great start for speed testing but I do like some of the other tools you’ve pointed out. I think that speed is something that is often overlooked in a typical seo analysis. Very well done.

By: richardbaxterseo

richardbaxterseo — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 14:46:59 +0000

Lots of helpful and constructive comments on this post for which I'm extremely grateful. Thought I'd update the post (via comments) with some learning / further useful resources I've come across since writing this post. By now you'll be aware that Google Webmaster Tools now has an enhanced page speed / performance report in Webmaster Tools Labs. More on that on my post on Blogstorm. I've found Google's Chromium blog an excellent insight into the world of performance obsessed software developers. This video series titled: "Technically speaking, what makes Google Chrome fast?" is well worth watching, as is the Chromium blog subscribing to! I've reduced my blog load time from 9 seconds to around 2!. The majority of this is owed to the Wordpress plugin, WP-Super Cache which, with GZip compression enabled, makes this site pretty darn fast! Have fun with your sites and let me know what performance improvements you make in the next few weeks!

By: Ashkan Parsa

Ashkan Parsa — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 14:16:33 +0000

Ok, having tested most of them now here are my faviourits:

http://tools.pingdom.com/ to see how long it took for the page to load and a breakdown of files downloaded. Great to immediately see which files are not optimised.

http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/ to get a easy to follow report on areas you can improve

By: Ashkan Parsa

Ashkan Parsa — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 13:56:30 +0000

Tool heaven! I have so many Firfox pugins now I have lost track!

Tested WebPagetest.org. useful for measuring page performance from different locations and countries. But those tables a bit of a nightmare to make sense of.

Tested YSlow. Really useful tool (you have to also install Firebug, another fantastic tool). The speeds it marks every time a page loads doesn’t seem very accurate, so a bit flaky there, but the report is great. nice breakdown of data.

By: seo freelancer

seo freelancer — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 14:07:44 +0000

In fact nothing new – page loading time is one of first criteria of on-site optimization process. And very important too, as some heavy un-optimized pic or monstrous js can ruin your career.

By: richardbaxterseo

richardbaxterseo — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 09:06:08 +0000

Great feedback so far and interesting points made – it will be interesting to see how page load times are interpreted by the SEO’s in the forums.

By: Cata

Cata — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 07:17:58 +0000

Now we just have to wait for the page loading time hysteria to hit the forums… it’s going to be really hot!

By: Destiny Islands

Destiny Islands — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 05:22:26 +0000

These are some great tips, I have noticed a lot of my sites slowing down as I am adding more content to them so speeding them up is a big priority for me. Sweet tips, and good job hitting the front page of Sphinn!

By: richardbaxterseo

richardbaxterseo — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 10:35:49 +0000

Hi T-SEO – yeah my site ranks well in Google for the moment. I admit, though, that I’d like it to be a little faster myself. That’s why I did the research on these tools

By: josh

josh — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 05:52:17 +0000

great info, many thanks FYI

By: T-SEO

T-SEO — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 02:52:56 +0000

” In the example from SEOgadget above”

Are you sure you are ok with this number, 4 seconds for Google to load one page of seogadget.co.uk, I have never seen a number like that before, most the time this number is less than 1 second, please confirm if this number still showing 4 seconds and the site still crawled well by Google

By: hung bui

hung bui — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 19:55:45 +0000

This is brilliant idea. We all should have considered this for long time ago. However, since the internet speed has improved so quick, it is hard to notice if the site is slow or fast.
I definately support this for SEO ranking.

Cheers.

Hung

By: nachia

nachia — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 02:24:58 +0000

hi thanks for your example

By: richardbaxterseo

richardbaxterseo — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 17:20:51 +0000

Ahh – thanks Patrick, that is something I missed. Grateful for your input!

By: Patrick Meenan

Patrick Meenan — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 11:54:08 +0000

FWIW, on webpagetest.org, the data table below the waterfall is sortable (click on the column headings). Still not a full rich experience but a little better than completely static. Some UI hints need to be added to make it clear that it can be sorted.

By: Richard Gilmore

Richard Gilmore — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 08:47:59 +0000

Thanks putting it all together. Here’s another tool that you might find useful. It let’s you check yout site’s speed and compare it against your ten top ranked competitors:

http://www.link-assistant.com/news/check-your-site-speed.html

By: toby

toby — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 00:51:08 +0000

At work, we use a website accelerator called aptimize – you got to be on dedicated though, it does an awesome job of automating optimization and increasing website speed which we used to ‘try’ by hand and does a way better job it it.

Agreed – YSlow, Fiddler and WebpageTest.org are also essential web performance testing tools.

By: John Paul

John Paul — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 17:15:42 +0000

Great list. I been running Super Cache,, but I read on yoast that he runs W3 and memcached,

Mite have to make some changes afetr I run few tests on these sites.. TY for the list.

By: SEO Boy

SEO Boy — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 21:43:24 +0000

Looks good. Will try webpagetest to see how it works.

By: richardbaxterseo

richardbaxterseo — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 18:32:12 +0000

Cool – thanks Sockmoney. Loved reading a few pages from your blog btw. Will return later.