Appatic

There are many ways to measure if a website is slow to load or not. You can base it by browser or by broadband line speed and even by the specs of a PC to a degree.  But there is another way to get a good idea of that. One that happens to be as authoritative as you can get.

Page Speed Online from Google Labs is a  website that allows you to quickly analyze the performance of your website from both a desktop and mobile perspective according to Google. And since Google is still the #1 Search Engine, it is a good idea to take their advice very seriously as they plan on taking website load speed as a factor for pagerank sooner than later.  This tool will give you a desktop and a mobile score. With each score there will be suggestions on how you can speed your site.

Page Speed Suggestions Priority Levels:

• High priority. These suggestions represent the largest potential performance wins for the least development effort.
• Medium priority. These suggestions may represent smaller wins or much more work to implement.
• Low priority. These suggestions represent the smallest wins. You should only be concerned with these items after you've handled the higher-priority ones:
• Rules without suggestions. There are no suggestions for these rules, since this page already follows these best practices. Good job!

While Page Speed Online got 3 different priority levels and one Rules check. The only really important and meaningful ones to take note on are the High Priority suggestions and the Rules Check.  The high priority suggestions translate into the biggest performance (as in loading speed and responsiveness) wins and the Rules Check refer to if your website follows best website development practices or not. It should be the case, because if not, that could represent in many ways the biggest factor in your website not being fast enough.

Now, what score means my site is fast enough?

Getting to 100 will be pretty damn hard unless your website is just static text. Only Google.com gets that rating. For example even Facebook.com login screen gets 99.  Desktop Bing.com gets 94.

So, for that reason the minimum score you should aspire to is 80 points in the desktop test and 75 in the mobile test. If you get a score below than that, you should follow the high priority suggestions given by Page Speed Online and improve your website to a higher score.

If your site gets over 90 in the desktop test and over 85 in the mobile test. There is nothing for you to worry about as improving beyond that will be hard to do as it would require some serious nitpicking and possibly tweaking.

In turn this gives us that the most comfortable score to get is 85 in the desktop test and 80 in the mobile test. Check what is your score is and see if your website is in the right or wrong side of it.  Alternatively to the web tool, you can also get the Page Speed test as a extension for Google Chrome (or SRware Iron) and Firefox (3.6+).

Linkage

Page Speed Online

Page Speed Chrome Extension

Page Speed Firefox Extension 

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