6 Tools to Optimize Your Page Load

The Google Webmaster blog has officially stated that page load time is now a factor in Google's ranking algorithm. Even though they state that page load time only affects less than 1% of queries, this is still 1% of 100+ billion searches a month. Below are a few tools to help you test your site's page load time more effectively.

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• Page Speed, an open source Firefox/Firebug add-on that evaluates the performance of web pages and gives suggestions for improvement.
• YSlow, a free tool from Yahoo! that suggests ways to improve website speed.
• WebPagetest shows a waterfall view of your pages' load performance plus an optimization checklist.
• In Webmaster Tools, Labs > Site Performance shows the speed of your website as experienced by users around the world as in the chart below. We've also blogged about site performance.
• 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.
• Webpage Analyzer: Their script calculates the size of individual elements and sums up each type of web page component