The speed at which your site loads is widely known as a factor that helps to determine your site rankings. But not many people care. Well, I’m telling you, you should!

In this article I look at ways you can test your site speed and improve the load time for a better user experience and improved search engine rankings (and also reduce server bandwidth along the way). Not only that, but with mobile phones being used more and more for internet surfing it’s even more important to make sure your site gets served up as quick as a tinned soup starter in a trucker’s cafe.

First of all, you’ll need to test the speed of your site. I’ve mentioned Alexa before, as they offer a site speed check so this should be your first stop if you want the easy way. Visit Alexa and enter your URL.

For those that want more detail, download the Page Speed add-on for Firebug, which gives you plenty of information on what can be compressed, optimised and changed.

Alternatively, WebPageTest offers the same information via their website so there’s no need to install anything, although it does need some digging through to find the juicy information.

Here is a quick overview of some of the common (and easily fixed) areas you could look at to improve the speed at which your page loads:

• Remove inline Javascript and put into external files
• Remove inline CSS styles and put into external stylesheets
• Compress images to small file sizes, while still retaining image quality
• Reduce coding, where possible, within Javascript, CSS and HTML code
• Host all images locally
• Use thumbnails where larger images are necessary
• Specify image dimensions

Have you experienced rankings from speeding up your site? How about better conversions as a result of a faster site? Let me know in the comments below.

Over the last few months or so, there has been some hype around the fact that Matt Cutts said that page loading times would be considered as a ranking factor. This is something google have never ‘announced’ before; so many people took this to mean that this would be a primary ranking factor. This is utterly ridiculous. Google considers page load times if other ranking factors are equal.

Having said this, I do think load times are important. If not just for SEO, but for usability too. Imagine being in an area where the internet is considerably slower than the fast broadband speeds many of us enjoy today (lucky folks in Finland – their government has made it a legal right to have broadband internet connections) – think how annoying it would be to have to wait and wait and wait for the page you’re interested in to load. I know I’d start throwing things around the room and generally getting in a grump… Not a good place to be in when making buying decisions methinks.

So, for these reasons I do consider page load times to be important.

Here are some free tools to test your load times:

http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/ - Although it isn’t the prettiest of tools, it does perform the function quite well, and gives a useful analysis with recommendations.

http://tools.pingdom.com/ – A much more attractive interface, but it doesn’t give specific recommendations. For that reason it’s not as useful as the previous example.

http://www.iwebtool.com/speed_test – This isn’t all that useful for diagnosing why your page loads slowly. However, it could be useful if you’ve just added an object such as a flash file to your site and want to see the effect it has on the time your page takes to load. But, remember there’s little point if you don’t check the site before you add the object as well as after!

http://www.uptrends.com/aspx/free-html-site-page-load-check-tool.aspx – Produces graphs very similar to the pingdom tool, but allows you to choose different checkpoints.

http://www.webpagetest.org/test – This gives by far the most comprehensive results. Although it gives a lot of information, it can be difficult to understand. It has a visual comparison, so you can check your load times against your competition, which could in some instances be extremely useful.

If anyone knows of any better tools for checking load times, please tell us about it in the comments section. Thanks.