As tech writers like PC World’s Juan Carlos Perez and Chris Crum of WebProNews among others have noted, the monolith of Mountain View, the all-powerful Google has become obsessed with speed, which means you should be too.
Google has been obsessing over making its own search results faster, making browsers faster by introducing Chrome, and as Mr. Crum points out in the article linked to above, may be making the speed of your site a factor in search ranking.
Thankfully, Google has provided us with a tool to see why your web pages are so damned slow. Check out PageSpeed, a Firefox addon. It requires FireBug, which you should already have in your toolkit—it’s indispensable for bug fixing and for reverse-engineering someone else’s code, like you might do when customizing a WordPress theme.
Yahoo! has also released a Firefox addon that also runs in conjunction with FireBug. YSlow will give you a second opinion on what’s slowing you down and how to speed your site up.
For more on optimizing your site, visit http://code.google.com/speed/ which provides oodles of resources on how to make your site speedier.
Cord is the director of new media at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. He has been a web developer for over a decade, working with non-profits to rein in their web development costs and grow their online audiences through simple best practices.
