Wednesday, December 02, 2009 at 2:04 PM
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!
86 comments:
Funny, one of the first recommendations I get is that I should use gzip on ...
... http://www.google-analytics.com/ga.js (13,6 kB)
See (Dutch) screenshot.
Bob
And when I check my blog, hosted by Blogger (also a Google asset), it recommends gzipping:
* http://www.blogger.com/static/v1/widgets/709343109-widgets.js (42,5 kB)
* http://www.blogger.com/static/v1/widgets/1550194411-widget_css_bundle.css (7,41 kB)
* http://www.blogger.com/static/v1/v-css/3727950723-blog_controls.css (425 bytes)
* http://www.blogger.com/static/v1/v-app/scripts/4095335807-common.js (16,1 kB)
So Google, when will you act on you own recommendations?
Bob
Very useful, thanks Webmaster tools team. This will help encourage efficient sites.
I like the new Site Performance feature, but didn't we already have the crawl performance stats in the Webmaster Tools?
Then again, surely these two features are different, because they don't show the same performance... ????
Compare crawl stats with the site performance graph.
Bobwh
Hey ! It's a very good experimental feature in Webmaster Tools !
Hum... speed is going to be a huge factor in SEO moving in to 2010 ?
Out of 5 DNS look ups I have for my site, 3 are maps.google.com, googlesyndication.com and www.google-analytics.com! would be nice if Google can serve these services through the same domain, just a thought :)
same for me: the tools complains google is not compressing their scripts ^^
-----
gzip-Komprimierung aktivieren
Die Komprimierung der folgenden Ressourcen mit gzip könnte ihre Übertragungsgröße um 18,6 KB reduzieren:
http://www.google.com/afsonline/show_afs_ads.js (4,95 KB)http://www.google-analytics.com/ga.js (13,6 KB)
-----
Why am I constantly amazed by you guys at Google?
In 30 minutes I've discovered and implemented gzipping for our redcort.com web site. We've reduced the size of our primary pages by a little over 80%. Our pages load noticeably faster with very little effort.
Thank you!
@Bob Coret - on a first look I made the same conclusion, why is there such a difference between the crawl time average and this speed figure? Look again at the post above, this speed rating is based on the real experience using various data points. What shows up in Webmaster Tools is the time the bot takes to get the HTML (and I guess maybe the JS, who knows these days...).
@Bob Coret
As for why ga.js is not gzipped, I think this is more a problem with the 'labs' feature having a bad hair day, than the Analytics js not being gzipped. Don't recall ever having seen this happen and just checked and this serves with a gzip response header.
ime geting somewhear now,
great feature very interesting info!
Does this work on Chrome
@Del Boy - I used it in Chrome, so did for me.
i noticed of particular interest that on the google.ca homepage, compression of the google logo would save 5.5% and that 42.2% of css is unused, definitely makes me feel better about the wave of enhancements needed on my sites :)
Way to fill up an entire blog post with links to nothing and forget to actually put a link to the product you're writing about! ;-)
"Adam said..."
Exactly what I was thinking! Exactly!!!!
Probs is Page Speed plugin is not supporting Firefox 3.6b4.
I went to webmaster tools->Labs->Site Performance. I saw page speed suggestions for my blog and when I try to install Page-Speed and it gave me a error message as "Page Speed 1.3.0.1 could not be installed because it is not compatible with Firefox 3.6b4."
Any help?
And of course faster-loading pages means less strain on Google's servers which means less overheads for the big G.
BB
1) Looking at the graphs they do not seem to correspond with the calculated average. Sites with 1 spike take up to 5-6 seconds avr. to load according to the tool, while other sites with many spikes have load times of 0.5 seconds?
2) Is the load time for individual users a good metric? A person with a lowband internet connection in China will get very different results as a student on the local University network in the EU. I might be targetting the latter. How does Google take these differences into account?
I still prefer the Yslow tool over Page Speed, it has nicer graphs as well.
We notice that Drupal websites with aggregated CSS (sprites) and JS files show very good avr. load times.
nice feature...
i have some sites which have big images on it...
i have to work on it now....
i will start using gzip now..!! ;)
nice info,a good experimental features
great feature! thanks webmaster tools team~
But it shows unreasonably high value (8 seconds) of my site~which is very different from what i see using firebug+page speed(average 2 seconds without cache).
I can't figure out why~please help~
This is a handy feature indeed Google. I believe the webmaster tools team has surely delivered a tool that allows easy analysis of performance, thanks guys!
Now the ball is over at us as well as the Google teams that create so many useful tools we all like to use such as Google maps.
My Google maps implementation seems to need 10 JS requests (2 for maps.google.com) and 8 for (maps.gstatic.com) according to the Google Webmaster tools.
I might suggest you actually link to the service you are promoting in your blog post. See along with speed of a Web site, user experience is also very important factor that determines the success or failure of a Web site.
excellent idea. You will actually educate all about the making website faster.
Great tool, thanks.
As with the other page speed tools out there, it pulls up Google Analytics as one of the slowest loading page items on most sites that I've checked - Any way they can speed that up?
@Robin Laverick Google Analytics can be set up to be really quick to load. We just recently posted about a new tracking snippet at http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2009/12/google-analytics-launches-asynchronous.html . More information on the Analytics setup can be found at http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/tracking/gaTrackingOverview.html or of course in the Help Forum at http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Google+Analytics/
Great! Looks very close to what ShowSlow (http://www.showslow.com) does, but already cooked into crawl stats, plus it's from real users.
Very helpful- SEOs can make recommendations all they want, but when it comes to changes like how the pages are created, we need some real data to back us up. What better source than Google to tell us what the page speed REALLY is and some concrete recommendations to improve?
I'm looking forward to the case studies in the next few months from people saying how much their site traffic (and sales?!) increases by having faster load times!
ps- My sites list the rec to gzip GA, as well.
With regards to "examples of specific pages and their actual page load times",Google should not include administration pages of a site because load time of those pages is irelevant, for both human users and search engines.
Including administration pages makes average load time wrong.
Furthermore, those pages are protected by login / password and robots.txt file.
In the "examples of specific pages and their actual page load times", Google should not include administration pages of a site because load time of those pages is irrelevant, for both human users and search engines.
Including administration pages makes average load time wrong.
Furthermore, those pages are accessibleonly to administrator (not search engines).
All I know is that my site is a lot faster than most of Google's websites. My 7meg download speed always waits for Google to pull their head out of their ass and let me access their slow double standard websites. Search speeds have been consistently slowing down over the last few years. Translator and Blogger have been sometimes non-responsive. YouTube has been POOR at best. Yet, my RSS feed is full of BS from Google about making MY site faster. Figure it out Google! Your slow!!
added the website accelerator, aptimize wax, to our 3 sites last month and the results have been amazing. At the end of the day faster sites are better for everyone - it doesn't have to be a big deal and you don't need to do it all yourself.
My site http://getabest.com more faster than google say at WMT. Very strange... Maybe this tool beta
re google not gzipping
-is this not due to browsers not caching gzipped content, where as a file like ga.js you'd want cached on everyone's browser?
Funny, one of the first recommendations I get is that I should use gzip on ...
... http://www.google-analytics.com/ga.js (13,6 kB)
See (french) screenshot.
great tools for blogger..keep update with latest tools..thanks..
THINK OUT OF THE BOX:Kerja Keras Adalah Energi Kita
Why would pages that are disallowed an noindexed be appearing in the example pages under Site Performance on GWC? Thanks!
rmonkeygirl,
"The load time data is derived from aggregated information sent by users of your site" so in that context pages disallowed in robots.txt or noindexed via meta tags might still be accessed. Thus these pages can show up in the Site Performance "example pages" report.
cubayladictadura-narayani.blogspot.com
los expatriados cubanos
par yusel
The delay shown in are way off compared to what we see in our logs. More information on this would be great help.
Sure this Will help To some extent i think.But Why does it shows me to compress even google's js file!
Hey there,
I like it new Google Webmaster Tools' Site Performance feature...
Thanks Google..
Regards
Arpit Kothari
SEO Expert
Congratulations Google !!!
I love site performance tool.
Regards
Sanjay Malhotra
Guoup Consultant
www.webflavors.in
All of us know that we dislike certain things. I dislike a "flash entro" to a site that I have to click to "enter". I usually will not enter.
When I am waiting for a site to load I don't have the patience and stop the load and go elsewhere.
My problem is that I cannot use compression with my web service. So I work to improve my performance on my own as I want someone who went to the trouble to seek my site not to turn away because of loading issues.
My host as well as http://www.whatsmyip.org/http_compression/ and http://www.gidnetwork.com/tools/gzip-test.php both say that our pages are compressed, yet page speed says we have a problem with some mime types and the js from analytics perhaps the new google webmaster tool is not functioning properly.
It would be very cool if performance data could be coordinated with analytics, as with websites I run, some pages load slower than others, and I would like to correlate this to bounces, exits, page popularity, etc.
I've thought so far that the site speed is merely internet connection and file size matter. Thank you for this valuable information
thanks
forumetki
Very nice. Thanks. Gzip compression is now turned on
very good information, now I can analyze the speed of all of my websites. I have analyze my personal website: seo specialist and done some minor changes as per your guideline and now site is opening very fast.
@John Mueller / @Googlers
There's a bug with CSS media types - e.g. it shouldn't be recommending that a CSS file with media=screen and another with media=print should be combined.
@Ian M
Round trips can be expensive, so it's worth trying to optimize that. If you have two such CSS files that you often serve together, you can consider combining them into one, and specifying the media type in the file itself (as opposed to the "link" tag):
// combined file
@media screen { ... file1 contents ... }
@media print { ... file2 contents ... }
Hi, mines loading in 0.11 of a sec. I would presume this is fast enough. Graham from logo-n-stitch.co.uk.
Why it shows 10 seconds for my site? I've never seen my site to load so slow.
very good explain, thankss
Usefull, it will help the page more fast to load!
A very reasonable idea! It will sure click.
Thanks
Tissy
@sreeram yes, it would be better if browsers didn't download stylesheets not valid for the current media type unless needed, but unfortunately they do (well, Firefox at least).
I was hugely skeptical, but now I see that site performance = very useful. It's made me devote time and effort to site optimization and issues I have never considered before.
However, I'd really like to know how recent Google's data is. After making lots of improvements to my site to improve performance, it seems to have got rather worse! The examples of pages and times Google is listing for my site don't seem to reflect the changes I've made. So it's confusing. The performance graph *suggests* you are measuring performance almost in real-time, but the example pages you list for my site show you can't possibly be. I am seeing recommendations for things I fixed weeks ago. Can someone please advise: how recent is the performance data?
Not in google chrome ?
@chrisw
The Page Speed suggestions shown on Webmaster Tools can occasionally lag behind the "last updated" date shown, due to some mumbo-jumbo about how our internal systems work.
If you have fixed your pages, then you should relax and let the systems catch up (which will happen sooner or later). Meanwhile, we highly recommend that you install the Firefox extension and run it yourself. It offers more comprehensive and fresh suggestions.
@sreeram
who is the we in "we highly recommend that you install the Firefox extension"?
For all those getting the suggestion of using gzip on http://www.google-analytics.com/ga.js
First of all, gzip is to zip html/php etc. and for js/css/gif/jpeg etc. it requires to use Apache “mode deflate“ and all the Google js/css are very well compressed. The problem you are getting this suggestion is because either your browser or the network doesn’t support gzip encoding.
You can check each of your website element if they are gzipped or not at http://whatsmyip.org/mod_gzip_test/
Good luck!
website speed tools should be like this. very useful and easy
It would be great if you guys would allow us to export a site speed report.
That's good tool for page speed. It is time to change our page more faster than ever.
I have a problem my site at google webmaster is showing that all my sitemaps are unreachable. here is the report
Google webmaster tool:
Network unreachable: robots.txt unreachable
We were unable to crawl your Sitemap because we found a robots.txt file at the root of your site but were unable to download it. Please ensure that it is accessible or remove it completely.
I then edited it to:
User-agent: *
Allow: /
This is how Googlebot fetched the page.
The requested URL /http://www.hiwaar.com/ does not exist.
Thanks for the information - it has become clear how Google Labs in webmaster tools calculate the load time of a page. But: If you have bad luck an most of your website user use modem connection + Google toolbar this will lead to worse page speed results in webmaster tools...? This is my impression - at least.
Which Google to Believe??
Page Speed says my content is compressed (gzipped) with no problems.
The new WM Tools features says it isn't.
So what I want to know is which Google solution should I believe.
it is a good idea, thanks...
it is a good idea, thanks...
A global average is not appropriate for some sites. I have a site that is very fast in the US for US users, and in another country it's fairly typical in line with all the rest of the slow sites in that country where the internet has lower bandwidth overall. Does my page load time in Philippines affect my US users? Does it affect my US SERP placement? Please make the right choice and divide this by country both internally and in the interface you display to us. Thank you for the blog.
how big is it the importance of load speed on blog to SEO..since i've tried to make my blog as speed as possible but still it's bit difficult to get position on google for keyword Astaga.com Portal Lifestyle On The Net..
Very interesting.. and Ironic.
Compressing the following resources with gzip could reduce their transfer size by 13.7 KB:
* Go to URLhttp://www.google-analytics.com/ga.js (13.7 KB)
Even after using gzipI am still ranked among 70. I can not figure out what is wroong?
http://www.hiwaar.com
Any advice??????
A faster site can increase all aspects of your stats. Is it a good thing to split your gzips, to better manage size?
My sitemap is increasing at an alarming rate at my Article Directory.
I installed page speed tool. My web site is Vbulletin forum. I do not know how to use it.
Is this site performance tool still updating? I'd been checking it daily last week, but it hasn't rechecked my website since Feb 28.
About slow, I must say that the script must for alexa rankings web is a factor slowdowns unheard http://www.eric-jacob.com on my site! These range from 0.5 seconds to 5 seconds to load the page. I tried to slip it into a javascript onload, but then it finds himself disabled. When we know that google gives importance to both loading time and both the existence of such classification, we no longer know where to turn.
I've found that the Google performance in the webmasters tools doesn't relate to the actual times it takes to load pages or the Google page speed tool (it is a great tool though)
I have some pages, which in reality take less than 0.5 seconds to load, they have Google page speed scores of 99, and are very performance optimised. Yet, when I check the performance in the Google webmasters tools I'm told
"on average, pages in your site take 5.4 seconds to load (updated on Mar 13, 2010). This is slower than 76% of sites. (qualitypost.com site)
This is not true even on a bad day, none of my pages take that long to load!
Is there something additional that Google performance in the webmaster tools is gathering that isn't part of the google speed tool, and not related to how long the pages take to load???
I have not seen the site performance getting updated from April 5th, Are you guys seeing the same thing or it's just me?
I also recoomendation to use Gzip :P
my site is : http://www.ararattrip.com
Hi everyone,
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The Webmaster Central Team
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