By A Web Design

Optimization of Page Load Times:

Google has officially stated that page load time is now a factor in Google's page ranking algorithm. Hence the faster a page loads the happier the Google search engine will be which will have its impact on page rank.

Even though Google states that page load time only affects less than 1% of queries, this is still 1% of 100+ billion searches a month.

Hence, it makes a lot of sense to be able to check the page load times a website. There are a number of really excellent tools that do just this. Not only do the tools give you information about your web page load times but they also make a number of real useful suggestions on how to improve the web page load time as well.

Not only do they tell you what’s wrong with the web page they tell you how to fix it as well.

I’ve listed a few tools to help you test your site's page load time effectively and fix things that may be adversely affecting this.

Go right ahead and give any of them a shot, you may be amazed at what you learn about your website.

My personal out and out favorite is:
YSlow - a free tool from Yahoo!
URL: http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/

Diagram 1.

My second favorite is:
Page Speed, an open source Firefox/Firebug add-on.
URL: http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/

Diagram 2.

NOTE: The Download link is at the top right hand corner of the page.

Pingdom Tools: Every test also shows general statistics about the loaded page such as the total number of objects, total load time, and size including all objects.

URL:
http://tools.pingdom.com/

Diagram 3.