Google’s Webmaster Tools allows you to monitor your site’s performance over time. “Performance” has to do with how quickly your website loads. It is calculated based on the most frequently accessed pages by people who use the Google Toolbar and have PageRank activated. This allows Google to reflect real load times for real users. For example, if the majority of your visitors use high-speed broadband, the data will reflect these numbers rather than the numbers from people who get on your site with dial-up.

The first screenshot, from the Google Webmaster Central Blog, shows load time on the y-axis and time on the x-axis. The dotted line shows the 20th percentile value across all sites. It is what Google uses to separate the fast from the slow sites. The second screen shot, from the same blog, shows example pages and load times. The third screen shot shows helpful suggestions for getting your page to load faster.

It is important for you to know that at the time of this writing, Google site performance (speed) data does not affect your search engine ranking in any way. That could, of course, change eventually, but right now page load speed does not affect search engine ranking.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 28th, 2010 at 5:25 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.