Google announced a while ago that page speed will factor in a site’s PageRank. Around the same time, webmasters saw a new “Site Performance” section in the labs tab of Google webmaster tools. The natural conclusion I made (perhaps wrongly, I don’t know) was that the two were linked. If Google saw that my site was fast, it would benefit my rankings. And why not? It makes sense.
The only problem is that the results on the graph seem horribly inaccurate. Not a surprise since it’s mentioned above that the data is of low accuracy. But the times can be really off whack and webmasters like me who spend a lot of time optimizing our sites for speed get frustrated when we’re told that pages on our sites take 11 seconds to load! But I found a way to give Google real data about my site’s speed and that shows in the site performance graph.
Google gets page load speeds from the Google toolbar that some users install on their systems. It’s a very small percentage of Internet users and when one of them visits your site, the toolbar reports back the time taken to load the page if enhanced features are installed. The average page size on the Internet is 320 KB. If a user has a slow dial up connection with 15 KB/s download speeds, your page can take 21 seconds just to transfer the data! Not to mention requests, response time, DNS lookups etc. No wonder some sites with their audience focussed on a particular area report unrealistically high page load speeds with Google’s site performance tool. The low end DSL service provided by AT&T gives around 45-60 KB/s, which means a data transfer time of 7 seconds!
So what can you do as a webmaster? It’s simple really. Give Google better data!
I installed the Google toolbar on my Firefox browser. There’s no toolbar for Chrome which I use exclusively – pretty sad. I then go and visit my website using Firefox. I load several pages letting Google suck up page loads speeds with my reasonably decent Internet connection. I set my website as the home page for Firefox and whenever I open it, the toolbar pings Google and lets them know. After a month of doing this, heres my Webmaster Tools Site Performance improvement:
Pretty decent huh? At least it’s representative of my real page load speeds.
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