How fast is your site?

Wednesday, December 02, 2009

We’ve just launched Site Performance, an experimental feature in Webmaster Tools that shows you
information about the speed of your site and suggestions for making it faster.

This is a small step in our larger effort to
make the web faster.
Studies have
repeatedly shown
that speeding up your site leads to
increased user retention and activity,
higher revenue
and
lower costs.
Towards the goal of making every webpage load as fast as flipping the pages of a magazine, we have
provided
articles on best practices, active discussion forums and many tools to diagnose and fix speed
issues.

Now we bring data and statistics specifically applicable to your site. On Site Performance, you’ll
find how fast your pages load, how they’ve fared over time, how your site’s load time compares to
that of other sites, examples of specific pages and their actual page load times, and
Page Speed
suggestions that can help reduce user-perceived latency. Our goal is to bring you specific and
actionable speed information backed by data, so stay tuned for more of this in the future.

The load time data is derived from aggregated information sent by users of your site who have
installed the Google Toolbar and opted-in to its
enhanced features.
We only show the performance charts and tables when there’s enough data, so not all of them may
be shown if your site has little traffic. The data currently represents a global average; a
specific user may experience your site faster or slower than the average depending on their
location and network conditions.

This is a
Labs
product that is still in development. We hope you find it useful. Please let us know your
feedback through the
Webmaster Tools Forum.

Update on 12/04/2009: Our team just reconvened to provide you more information on this
feature. Check out
JohnMu’s
latest post on
Site Performance!

Posted by Sreeram Ramachandran, Software Engineer and Arvind Jain, Director, Faster Web program