Slow Blogs Lose Readers and Rank Lower (Part 1) – How Fast is Your Blog?

The Need for Speed

In this high tech, high speed, hyper-linked digital age you have less time than ever before to captivate your reader’s attention before they click away across the bloggerverse. Google knows this, that’s why page load time appears amongst the many factors in their search ranking algorithm. It’s not the only factor by any stretch, but if you care about Rankings and SEO and your readers, don’t neglect the speed of your blog.

(Read more on the big G’s research and conclusions regarding the effect of page load speed on user response here)

To put it bluntly, if you’re blog ain’t fast enough, you’re losing readers and ranking lower in the search engines.

How fast is fast enough? Simple – the faster the better.

20 seconds – you’re in trouble.

10 seconds – plenty of room for improvement.

2 seconds or less – awesome!

Step 1: diagnosis – How fast (or slow) is your blog?

These handy free tools will help you gauge the page load time on your blog.

iWebTool Speed Test

iwebtool.com is a suite of online web tools which includes the easiest page load speed test I’ve found so far. In fact, it’s so simple I’m not even going to add a screenshot – simply input up to 10 domain names and hit the Check! Button.

Here’s the link: www.iwebtool.com/speed_test

Pingdom

Next up is Pingdom’s page load time tool. Pingdom mimics the way that a web page loads in a web browser, and then outputs a full list of objects in load order. Options are available to display the results in a hierarchy to make it even easier to see which elements are slowing your blog or web page down.

Some key stats are shown as well – total load time, total objects, external objects, plugins, images and so forth. This is the output graph from a test of this blog:

The bars in the graph from Pingdom make it super-easy to see which elements of your page are putting the brakes on the speed of your blog. Working out the causal factors brings you a step closer to the ‘Speedy Blogzales’ which will satisfy both your readers and Google…

You can find Pingdom’s web speed tool here: http://tools.pingdom.com/

YSlow, Google Page Speed and Firebug

Getting a little more complex now, we have three addons for your browser – Firebug, YSlow and Google Page Speed

Google Page Speed and YSlow are addons for Firefox and Chrome. They both require another addon called ‘Firebug’ to run, so you’ll need to install that as well.

Both Google Page Speed and Yslow can be run more or less instantly on any webpage by opening Firebug, selecting the relevant tabs, and clicking.

YSlow (produced by the Yahoo Developer Network) measures a site against certain performance standards. It gives an output like this:

And a Google Page Speed test returns something like this:

With both tools, each component analyzed can be clicked on to reveal a further explanation of what should be done to accelerate your page load time, along with how to do it.

Clicking the ‘Tools’ tab within YSlow reveals suggested adjustments to code and a handy option to use ‘All Smush.it’ to compress the images on the page in question.

Most of the info provided here is way above the technical grasp of the average blogger though (myself included), so if you’re truly serious about speeding up your blog to the absolute maximum, you may want to call in a techxpert for help.

Download These tools here:

Firebug: http://getfirebug.com/

YSlow: http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/

Google Page Speed: http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/download.html

This article will help you make further sense and use of the results of the Google Page Speed test: http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/docs/using_firefox.html

whichloadsfaster?

Back to simplicity again and undoubtedly the most fun speed measuring tool available – Which Loads Faster. Go head to head with your competition and see who’s blog or website loads faster. Here’s the result of a test I ran against ProBlogger.net:

Here’s what Ryan Witt, the author of whichloadsfaster has to say about the tool:

“whichloadsfaster is a fun way to spread the word that web performance matters. It’s about friendly competition and about testing in everybody’s browser, not just ones that have nice performance tools already.”

You can access this tool at: http://whichloadsfaster.com/

That’s more than enough tools to monitor and check your blog’s page load speed – the next question is of course

How do you speed up your blog?

All will be revealed in next Friday’s edition of ‘Resources and Tools for Bloggers’ – Speed Up Your Blog with Ease.

Hope you enjoyed this – please share it if you think your friends and networks might want to speed up their blogs and websites too, and click on the Google +1 buttons too.

Any other thoughts on measuring the speed of your blog? How fast is your blog? Join in the conversation with a comment below..

To Your Abundance, Freedom and Speedy Success,

Slow Blogs Lose Readers and Rank Lower (Part 1) – How Fast is Yours? ©2011 Blogger’s Alchemy