New Google Tool Tells You How to Make Your Site Faster

By Ben Parr 

Google has released Page Speed Online, a Google Labs project that analyzes any website for its speed and gives suggestions on how to improve it.

The experimental tool is straightforward to use; just type in a website and Google will come back with suggestions for how to improve that website’s speed. The suggestions are ranked as either High, Medium or Low. In addition, Google displays which rules of thumb a website is already following. Each website also gets an over score out of 100.

Here are a few examples of site issues that Google says might be slowing down your site:

• High Priority: Enable Keep-Alive and leverage browser caching.
• Medium Priority: Combine images into CSS sprites and minimize redirects.
• Low Priority: Minify JavaScript and remove query strings from static resources. 

While speed analysis tools have been around for years, Page Speed Online has a neat little trick; it can also analyze mobile websites for their performance. And rather than using the same set of suggestions for desktop websites, Google has a fresh set of suggestions for mobile site optimization.

Google has been consistently launching tools like Site Performance and its page speed Apache module in order to help speed up the web. The search giant has made speed one of its core missions because a faster web equals more revenue for Google.