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Page Speed and Google Developer Tools Good vs Evil

In the quest for the Holy Grail that is know as Search Engine Optimization it is important to know that Google “Ranks and Rewards” a website for being coded properly, among many other things. Now Google is not the only Search Engine that practices these methods, but if you ask any american if they care about any other Search Engine, the response is not going to surprise anyone anytime soon. Even with their recent announcements of collecting all of your search data to target ads specific to what you are looking for, Google is still the #1 Search Engine in the world. I know that is up for debate and has been argued both ways by some of the most brilliant minds this generation has ever seen.

So How can you test your site to see what your “Page Speed” is? It’s actually quite simple once you install a plugin to your browser. This is a fairly easy task if you are able to follow a simple set of instructions. For the sake of this article I am going to be using Page Speed in Google Chrome. After installing Page Speed and restarting the browser you can visit any site you would like. Simply “right click” like you are going to view the page source and all the way at the bottom of the drop down list you will see “Inspect Element”. When you select that option you will see the page split in half horizontally. (See image). Now you can simply click on the Page Speed Tab and Run a Page Speed Test. This might refresh the page and it will obviously run through every line of code written on every single page associated with the site including Java Script Pages and anything else in the “head” tags. Once the test is done it will return a score like 35/100 to 87/100 depending on how well the site scored.

After you do this a few times on your favorite sites ( I encourage you to do so ) It’s time you to look at your own page and do the same thing. This time we are going to look at the results a little bit deeper. I am going to look at one of the site I currently run. Valley West Mortgage. When I run the page speed test right now (8:54 pm on Friday, March 16th 2012) I get the result of 81/100. Not bad. Now let me Refresh the page a few times and run the test again. 81/100 again. So it’s safe to say that even if the page is not 100% accurate (nothing in life ever is) I am some where in the neck of the woods of a B- rating. That’s great. Lets Try one more time for the fun of it. 81/100 again. If you look to the right of the score you will see a little orb, or colored ball reflecting a traffic signal. Green being good and so on. Now I am running the latest version of WordPress which is 3.3.1. So I can not take all, even half of the credit for my site ranking so well because I in fact did not write anything used in WordPress.

Now lets have a little more fun now shall we? If I log in to the Dashboard of WordPress, I will once again run the page speed test because it is still a live page on my site. I hope that was easy for the readers to assume. I get a 66/100 resulting in a yellow score. Not bad, but it’s not the 81/100 I was expecting. So as you can see each page you run will be different. Let’s run the page speed test inside my Plugins Tab. I am running 30 Plugins with this site. I get the same score of 66/100 again. For the fun of it, I am going to run the Page Speed Test one more time, this time inside the Setting Tab, again 66/100. So it is safe to say that all of my pages will more than likely be receiving the same score.

So you can see that by using WordPress, you are actually increasing your website or blog’s chances of Google Rewarding you in many different ways. And that is why almost any BLOG you come across in a search engine is running on WordPress.

Dont forget that our WordPress Meet up is this Monday, the 19th of March inside the Usr/Lib. See you all there.

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