Website Speed is rapidly becoming one of the most important factors for increasing your page rank. Website Speed is a measure of how fast or slow your website or blog takes to load is now a factor considered by the mighty Google and of course that means the other search engines too.

Website Speed – Why This Matters

Does your website or blog take a long time to load in Firefox, Chrome, Safari , Is its  performance not at it’s best? How quickly does the page load? Do you even know. Is it sluggish and slow and kind of annoying………? If the answer to those questions is yes then you should take notice because if you find you website or blog is slow to load then so do your visitors who are looking for Information and don’t generally display a lot of patience. More importantly the mighty Google is watching your Website Speed and its costing you…..

Back in April of 2010 Google added a new requirement to its algorithm for its Page Rank score; Website speed. Which means if your website or blog is Slooooow to load then you are losing ground to your more savvy competitors. They profit whilst you lose Money and have to spend time you don’t have trying to figure out whats wrong.

Read more about Website Speed and page speeds here In Google’s own words.

Your website’s performance is one of the key factors Google measures to make sure that the visitors that it sends to your website or blog are having a “good experience” when they visit. Particularly as that pertains to your Website speed, so its worth it, in my humble opinion, to spend a little time optimizing your website or blog to Increase your Website Speed. However there is a problem…………how the hell do you measure your Website speed, which is essentially measuring how long it takes for your Blog to load.

How To Measure Your Website Speed

Now a word of caution here, Before you go diving into an optimization frenzy I would recommend that you measure your current Website Speed performance and find out exactly what is going on with your website or blog before you take any actions that could do more harm than good. Its important to measure first and then act second…….Do the opposite and you run a high risk of totally screwing your website or blog and then it may never load at all.

My favourite way of measuring my sites performance is a free service at Gtmetrix. There are also free services at Pingdom tools The video above explains how GT metrixs works and how to make use of its many features. Both of these FREE services are very powerful and that must be used with caution. Make a single adjustment and re-measure the page to see what that has done to the page load speed. Some changes may have the opposite effect.

All in all don’t make adjustments for the sake of it, only make adjustments that are measured and have a positive effect on your Website Speed or blog load times .

So once you have completed your Website Speed Test you can now go ahead and find out whats slowing it down and fix it. There is of course a couple of plugins that will take care of 95% of the common issues that slow your site down. To find out what I use and How to optimise these effectively read this post;