Speeding Up Your Website With Google – Test My Site
Google recently released Test My Site which is part of their Make the Web Faster initiative which has been running since 2009. This tool will analyse your website and produce a report showing what you need to do to make it faster. It also shows what your estimated visitor loss is due to page speed.
I was eager to try out this new tool and so I ran it on a few sites to see how they compared. Afterwards I compared the results against the Google Chrome developer tools.
Below are the results.
| Test URL | Loading Time | Est. Visitor Loss | Chrome Browser |
|---|---|---|---|
| amazon.com | 3s | Low | 1.7s |
| facebook.com | 5s | 19% (Good) | 2.9s |
| twitter.com | 8s | 28% (Fair) | 2.66s |
| youtube.com | 9s | 29% (Poor) | 2.83s |
| microsoft.com | 11s | 30% (Poor) | 1.92s |
Summary of Results
You will see that there are some massive variations between the two methods. Consider Microsoft.Com. Google Chrome states that it loads in 1.92 seconds and the Test My Site tool reports that it loads in 11 seconds. There are many reasons why there might be discrepancies, but not that large. I’m going to contact Google to see why this is and I’ll update this post when I get a response.
