Page Speed

[Bryan_Loconto]

Google recommends a page load speed of 1.4 seconds, is it recommended to have that page speed for every page on the site, or just the landing pages. Is there a tool that will check the load speed of every page on a site and report the slow pages?

The free online tools only check one page at a time.

[Bryan_Loconto]

Thank you Jeff! Your answer is very in depth and helpful.

[KempRugeLawGroup]

I just want to add one more free tool: http://www.webpagetest.org/

Best,

Ruben

[GPainter]

Jeffs got some great point. Users are lazy and they dont like to wait and they wont so a good speed is a good idea!

try the following -

https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/

This above will give you some great suggestions how to improve the speed.

https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/service/tryit

Google won't give you a penalty if you cant test something so the above will let you test the speed. Google is pretty neat like that.

Best off all the above are all free

Go have some fun!

[customerparadigm.com]

Bryan -

Yes, a fast load time for your pages is a strong signal to Google and other search engines that you care about the end user experience.  People like pages that load quickly.

The http://tools.pingdom.com/ site is a great place to start.  It's free, but you can only do one page at a time.

I would start with your home page, and other top traffic pages, and look at what you can do to better optimize them.  Look at what files and requests from the page load test take a long, long time to load.  Usually this is a common theme across your entire website, so fixing it in one place will help the entire site.

My recommendation would be to use a type of caching system, that reduces the load on the server.  Caching essentials turns a database-driven site (where all of your menu items, products, content, call-outs) require you to hit your database, and turn it into a basic HTML page.

Varnish is a good caching system (free) but there are others, too.  They do take time to set up and configure.  But once you do, it will help all of your pages on the site load much more quickly.

Beyond that, you can try to minimize your CSS using several services, too, and reduce image load times via a CDN (content delivery network).  Many of the top hosting providers will give you CDN access for your media files, either included with hosting or for a small extra fee.  It's worth it and can really speed up a site.

Finally, don't go cheap on your Web hosting.  A $5.95 per month account with Godaddy is not going to perform like a finely-tuned dedicated server that has plenty of memory to handle lots of people hitting your site at the same time.

We once took someone from a 45 second page load time to under 4 seconds, simply by changing their hosting provider.

Hope this helps!- Jeff