Google Webmaster Tools - Site Performance

See below for screenshot and explanation of Site Performance which is within the Labs category.

Here are the Google webmaster tools categories as they look when you are logged in (left).
Below is the same structure with clickable links which go to a Hard Web webpage with a screenshot of what is on that webmaster tools category page (in my own webmaster tools account).

• Site Configuration
  • Sitemaps
  • Crawler access
  • Sitelinks
  • Change of address
  • Settings
  • URL parameters
• Your site on the web
  • Search Queries
  • Links to your site
  • Keywords
  • Internal links
  • Subscriber stats
• +1 Metrics
  • Search impact
  • Activity
  • Audience
• Diagnostics
  • Malware
  • Crawl errors
  • Crawl stats
  • Fetch as Googlebot
  • HTML suggestions
• Labs
  • Custom Search
  • Instant Previews
  • Site performance - YOU ARE HERE!
  • Video Sitemaps

Webmaster tools - Labs - Site Performance

This diagnostic tool should be called Site Speed instead of Site Performance because that is what it is all about.
So called "Performance Statistics" reflect the speed of page load.
There is a link on the page to a download of "Page Speed" which is a tool to help you make pages (and associated scripts) smaller in file size so the page loads quicker.

It is a very useful tool if you wish to monitor your website's page loading time and the tool produces suggestions how to improve the speed of a webpage's loading...some of their suggestions are server related and I think they should pitch it to hosting companies becuase there is not much an average web designer (like me!) can do to " configure your web server to explicitly set caching headers" which is a bit of pagespeed advice.

I do wonder about the conflict between Page Speed and a lot of on-page Google tools like the custom search engine (CSE) or the +1 button or when I used to have Buzz and other Googly things on my pages...they make the page load ...oh so slow!

Google apparently gave the new "signal" of "speed of page load" a relatively low weighting in it's search ranking algorithm which ranks webpages against each other for particular keywords...(announced here on Webmaster Central blog on 9th April 2010)

Link to the diagnostic tool Page Speed now available online (new window).
You can add the Page Speed extension to Chrome (new window) and you used to be able to add it to Firefox where I used it but they don't seem to be compatible at the moment.
Learn more about Google and Page Speed

Here is a screenshot of what the Site Performance category looks like in a Webmaster tools account (this example below is from my own website's account).

Screenshots on this page are copyright © 2018 Google Inc.
If this page is not helping then you must go to the fount...Google Webmaster Tools Help (new window).
Also click to signup to get your own Webmaster tools account (new window).

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