Website Speed Analysis Tools

Google Page Speed & Yahoo Yslow speed analysis tools

Speed is a crucial aspect in providing a pleasant user experience to visitors of your site. It ensures that a visitor’s limited attention span and time are spent on actual content and not wasted waiting for images and scripts to load. Studies have shown that users will not tolerate more than a 4 second load time. If your site fails to offer a quick response, your users will leave.

 

In terms of SEO, Google is hinting at using Page Speed score in its ranking algorithm. As developers and marketers look to optimize their sites, page speed should be among the top optimizations to consider.

Two of the major speed analysis tools are Google’s Page Speed and Yahoo’s YSlow. Both require Firefox and the Firebug add-on.

Here’s a run down of each:

Page Speed

“When you profile a web page with Page Speed, it evaluates the page’s conformance to a number of different rules. These rules are general front-end best practices you can apply at any stage of web development. We provide documentation of each of the rules here, so whether or not you run the Page Speed tool – maybe you’re just developing a brand new site and aren’t ready to test it, you can refer to these pages at any time. We give you specific tips and suggestions for how you can best implement the rules and incorporate them into your development process.”

Read more about Google Page Speed

YSlow

“YSlow grades web page based on one of three predefined ruleset or a user-defined ruleset. It offers suggestions for improving the page’s performance, summarizes the page’s components, displays statistics about the page, and provides tools for performance analysis, including Smush.it™ and JSLint.”

Read more about Yahoo! YSlow

What’s the difference?

Page Speed and YSlow generally offer the same service, however there are differences in their calculations. Each service analyzes a page using a set of rules that they believe are most relevant to page speed and performance. Most of the rules overlap or are very similar to each other, but in general your scores should be comparable.

These are tools that you can use to see how your website currently ranks on a scale of 1-100 and you can also find out your web page load time speed.  The idea here is that you can see what Google and Yahoo think of your sites load times and if you have a low score below 90, then you probably need to do something about it.  Otherwise you very well might have a site that is loading super slow and that can be a huge turn off to anyone visiting your site and if they have to wait more then 5 seconds, then they will usually leave.

GETTING YOUR SITE BETTER GOOGLE PAGE SPEED SCORES & LOAD TIMES

So I will be showing you some examples of legal sites and how I have helped improve the Google page speed score from a 60 to a 95 and helped increase the load time from 10 seconds to 2.5 seconds.  Many lawyers dont even realize that they have super slow sites and might be losing potential clients because of it.   If your legal site is running slow, contact us today for assistance.

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