SEO Tools - Page Load Speed Tools

There's a whole lot of noise made about page loading times and most of it is very misleading. On some connections it can take a up to ten seconds for this page to load so is that bad?

Not really because the main content of the page opens immediately so the visitor can read or see what they came for straight away. Then there are a variety of smaller content sections such as the menu, social media share icons, etc. which load up later. They quietly get on with collecting their data from external servers which may be fast or slow, depending on the traffic they are handling, but their speed does not disturb the user experience.

I've written a more in depth blog post on the subject (Does my website load time affect my rankings) if you want to dig a little deeper but my overall advice is to look for real issues which slow your page loading down.

Mistakenly many webmasters think this means trying to remove or work round large files being loaded. However a large file being loaded from a fast server is less damaging than a small file being loaded from a slow server. It is the latter that will slow your page loading.

The Pingdom Answer

It's often said that 80% of issues are caused by 20% of content and that's also true of page loading speeds. What the Pingdom tool does is help you see what it is that is loading slowly so that you can take accurate action agains a targeted culprit.

Open the Pingdom Website Speed Test at http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/ and plug in your URL.

For each image or file that your page requests as it opens Pingdom will break down how long it takes to open as follows:

• DNS - The web browser is looking up DNS information
• SSL - The web browser is performing a SSL handshake
• Connect - The web browser is connecting to the server
• Send - The web browser is sending data to the server
• Wait - The web browser is waiting for data from the server
• Receive - The web browser is receiving data from the server

This allows you not only to find guilty files but also ascertain why they are guitly and then, if possible, resolve the issue.