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One of the many issues that confront the average Webmaster is how to boost site speed and performance. This is a very important issue because Internet speed varies across the globe and Web users are not always very patient when surfing the Web. Not everyone can afford to wait for 5 minutes in order to view a simple Web page. A slow Website is therefore a turn off and could potentially lead to loosing some of the few visitors you already have.
Although there are many expensive software programs out there that can assist a site owner with analysing and managing Web pages, there are also some very good and free tools that can be used to evaluate the speed of your Website. This post will take a look at some of these free speed tools to help you make up your mind depending on your preferences.
Page Speed
Page speed is an open source Firefox/Firebug add-on that evaluates the performance of Web pages and gives suggestions on how improvements can be made. It is affiliated to Google and performs several tests on a site’s server configuration and front-end code to increase the general speed of your Website and save some extra bandwidth and hosting costs.
Webmaster Tools
Google Webmaster Tools shows the speed of your Website as experienced by users, in comparison with other Websites across the globe. I recommend using this tool if you have not yet done so because it provides accurate results that could well be the motivation you need to actually try and improve your site speed. To access the tool, log on to your Google Webmaster site, click on the Labs tab and proceed to Site performance.
YSlow
The Yahoo! YSlow is a Firefox add-on integrated with the Firebug Web development tool. It analyses Web pages and suggests ways to improve their performance based on a set of rules for high performance Web pages. It also summarises the pages components, display their statistics and provide tools for performance analysis such as Sumsh.it and JSLint.
Zoompf
Zoompf is one of the least known site performance tools on the Internet. It provides a free scan and tells you how to make your website faster by crawling your Website in search of over 300 specific problems associated with slow performing sites.
WebPageTest
WebPageTest conducts test on submitted Web sites from the Internet and provides a waterfall of your page load performance as well as a comparison against an optimisation check-list. There is also a desktop version of the PageTest tool which could be beneficial for those who want to test a Web page inside a firewall.
Talking Point
Do you know of any other free speed tools?
Amazing article post it great tool for me.
Thanks.
very complete info thanks for sharing
.-= Traveler Club´s last blog ..Technorati Claim =-.
Thanks for your contribution guys.
Website speed is now one of the thing Google want to be using to rank website and webpage. It s very important to speed up your website an webpage to get good ranking.
Great article! I stopped by from blogcatalog and am very impressed with the depth of your articles. Thanks!
.-= Goose´s last blog ..ISS and the Crescents =-.
Cheers Goose. BlogCatalog is really a good place to find other bloggers 🙂
I’m glad you like Zoompf’s free web performance scanning service! We are always adding more performance tests and trying to improve the site. Please feel free to send us feedback at info@zoompf.com or on Twitter @zoompf.
You can use our free service at: http://zoompf.com/free
Thanks for the kind words!
I am using WordPress super cache is their anthing better thats beenspeed tested for blogs.
Man I didn’t know half the tools that were available I know what you do all day, research!
Page Speed is a great resource to utilize to check your website. I will have to check out the others that you provide here. Thank you for the information.
there are lots of other site talking about this matter, but your article makes the most sense. keep up the good work!
So thats means wordpress and short posts with anchor links is not enought to achieve good positions in google?
This tool is free of pay? If not, I would to ask for more informations about how its working. Could You give me some link to guide?
Hi,
It is true that Google will ban your site if you make too many anchors, or it is a legend? Someone can tell me?
Very helpful tools. Thanks for suggesting these.
i’m going to have to get this ff add on now. it looks really handy. good list of tools here!
This is exactly what I need. I have a couple of sites that are streaming video via Amazon S3 and the load time is appaling. Typically, I am getting nowhere when talking to my hosting company. I will try Yslow and Pagespeed and see where it gets me. Thanks
So far webmaster tool is one of the best tools I’ve come across. Its important to know about the performance of your site and make the necessary improvements in order to keep your visitors satisfied. The tools mentioned here sounds great but I’ve not tried most of the tools.
Really good information. I’ve read that site loading speed can effect your rankings. Is this true? Thanks!
Thanks for sharing! I’m glad to have been able to view this article. It’s a fantastic blog, and the community encourages response.
It is even more important now because Google uses your page speed in the algorithm.
Having a slow page could make the difference between 1st and 2nd place.
Great list!
I believe it is just a very very small part of the equation in Googles algorithm, but nonetheless it is important, if not for Google, then do it for the most important factor of your website: Your visitors.
Nothing as annoying as a slow website, maybe a not working website… 🙂
All of these tools are useful and important. I used google webmaster because all my sites were hosted in blogspot cause its free. Thanks for sharing this information.
Out of the options listed above, webmaster tools is what I have mastered. This tool is very useful. But it is also necessary to comply the TOS of this or else you will get banned.
I like the tools for webpage speed. that is something I have really gotten focused on lately. I really think that has a lot to do with a positive user experience. And of course Google takes that into consideration for ranking.
That’s really a very useful to increase the speed of website,I have need a lot of info about it,I am waiting your next post,thnx…………………………………………….
Great, thanks! I just used these on my site and it helped a ton