It’s no secret that Google likes speed. They have made several announcements about the importance of speed on the web and go so far as to describe themselves as “obsessed with web speed”. In April 2010, they announced that Google search was including a new signal in their search ranking algorithms: site speed.
“Historically, we haven’t had to use it in our search rankings, but a lot of people within Google think that the web should be fast,” says Matt Cutts, Google Software Engineer. “It should be a good experience, and so it’s sort of fair to say that if you’re a fast site, maybe you should get a little bit of a bonus. If you really have an awfully slow site, then maybe users don’t want that as much.”
To this end, Google has released a web performance tool commonly called “Page Speed“. There are actually several tools related to performance profiling of web pages. According to the Google overview:
“The Page Speed family consists of several products. Web developers can use the Page Speed extension for Firefox/Firebug to analyze performance issues while developing web pages. Apache web hosters can use mod_pagespeed, a module for the Apache™ HTTP Server that automatically optimizes web pages and their resources at serving time. “
Google Page Speed is an open source Add-on for Firefox and Firebug. This add-on will help you analyze deeply your website/blog in order to improve its performance and crawling process. The performance tool not only evaluates the performance of web pages, it will also provide suggestions on performance improvement. It performs several tests on a site’s web server configuration and front-end code. These tests are based on a set of best practices known to enhance web page performance. Webmasters who run Page Speed on their pages get a set of scores for each page, as well as helpful suggestions on how to improve its performance. It is also Google’s preferred environment for introducing new performance best practices.