You’ve got to love Google. They built their name on search — and still dominate the area — but also continue to pump out related (and unrelated) products and services. Like Google Docs, AdSense, Blogger, and now PageSpeed Insights.
The page speed tool analyzes and optimizes your website to implement the Web performance best practices.
According to Google, “Fast and optimized pages lead to higher visitor engagement, retention, and conversions. The PageSpeed family of tools is designed to help you optimize the performance of your website. PageSpeed Insights products will help you identify performance best practices that can be applied to your site, and PageSpeed optimization tools can help you automate the process.”
PageSpeed Insights fetches a site’s contents (HTML, JavaScript, CSS, images, etc) live, using a webkit-based renderer. It then runs the same PageSpeed analysis found in the PageSpeed browser extensions, and presents them online.
PageSpeed is a browser extension for Google Chrome and Firefox. It runs a number of diagnostic tests against a Web page and analyzes the page’s performance on a number of “rules” that are known to speed up page load time. The rules are based on general principles of Web page performance, including resource caching, data upload and download size, and client-server round-trip times. For each rule, PageSpeed gives a general score, using a simple red-yellow-green grading scheme and suggests specific techniques for correctly implementing each rule. It also provides some automatic optimization of external resources included on a page, such as minifying JavaScript code and compressing images.
According to Sean Power, co-founder of the consulting firm Watching Websites (as reported in the September AdSense newsletter) around 49% of users leave a site or go to a competitor if they experience performance issues.
Speed is not only important for retaining your users but it also plays a role in Google’s search ranking.
