Today's Nugget continues our topic on whether or not you should be upgrading your website. One of the frequently overlooked measurements is the download speed of your website.
In 2009, Google announced that it would measure the download speed of your website as a new part of its equation for website ranking. It's only 1 small part within a suspected 100+ other measured metrics, but you should still consider it.
Today's website tool is Website Optimization located at http://analyze.websiteoptimization.com.
Type in your website address into their "Enter URL to diagnose" field and click Submit Query.
The generated report does not provide a specific grade, but rather goes into detail about the number of individual files that make up your web page, and how to increase the download speed for each one.
The report lists every image on your page, every style sheet, each javascript, and any other file that might slow down the overall latency of your web page.
Websites designed prior to 2007 tend to have a lot of graphics used in the design. Any time you have more than 20 items on a single page you increase the wait time for page downloading.
The report and recommendations from Website Optimization give a better technical analysis of your website than the Website Grader tool we explained yesterday. These technical aspects are things that only your webmaster can fix with a full redesign of your website.
Specific things to look for are the TOTAL_OBJECTS, TOTAL_IMAGES and TOTAL_SIZE. If any of these things are in red you need to consider a website overhaul to bring you in line with current technology.
The items they are measuring will be new, unthought-of concepts from when your website was first created, but you should now consider seriously.
In tomorrow's Gold Nugget, we will show you another website grading tool that includes videos from one of Google's top guys.
