Google Introduces Page Speed To Google Labs

The launch of the Page Speed performance analyzer in Google Labs further confirms Google's fixation on the importance of page load times. If we weren't taking much notice of the significance of page speed before, this is certainly a heavy nudge in the arm.

Running the tool provides you with suggested improvements for your site categorised by priority, as well as an overall Page Speed score out of a possible 100. (We got 65 for our homepage!)

For those who want to optimise their site for a mobile audience, the tool offers a mobile report as well as the standard desktop analysis. This is a matter of utmost significance for Google, who insist that:

“...the high round-trip times of mobile networks, and rapid growth of mobile usage, understanding and optimizing for mobile performance is even more critical than for the desktop...”

The analysis tool was launched on the 31st March, and has already given rise to over 300 topics of discussion on the Google Groups page.

Page Speed analysis is also available in the GWC (Google Webmaster Console), and can be downloaded into the Developer Tools section in any browser from the relevant Google Code downloads page.

Within the Labs section in GWT, the Page Speed analysis provides webmasters with an average load time, comparative data over the past 6 months, and the percentage of sites which your pages are faster than. Of course, this is not a new addition to the GWT system, having made its début way back in December 2009.

Since then, page speed has become an increasingly powerful ranking factor, described by Google as follows:

“Page Speed Online analyzes the content of a web page, then generates suggestions to make that page faster. Reducing page load times can reduce bounce rates and increase conversion rates.”

Confident words then from the Google engineers at the forefront of the Page Speed feature, the introduction of which comes almost exactly a year after Google announced that page speed was to form one of the many ranking factors for websites following an experiment which demonstrated that speed matters.