Yesterday we discussed asynchronous tracking and page load time. But there’s more to page load than a simple script and I believe Google is about to get serious about including page load times in its ranking algorithms.

Google John Mueller has a great blog post on Site Performance and how it can help you improve your page load times.

I did a little bit of playing around with this tool and I’m pretty impressed. It’s quite simple, really, but very useful. Suggestions for improving a site’s page load time include such things as:

• Enable gzip compression
• Combine external JavaScript
• Minimize DNS lookups
• Combine external CSS

I’ve got a feeling these are all pretty common issues. For instance, how many CSS files do your pages have? A lot of webmasters use 2 or 3 CSS files for their pages when 1 will do. And DNS lookups can kill a site. If you have a lot of external files that are housed on another server, that can seriously slow your load time.

If you are serious about being a top-notch webmaster and want to improve your site's performance, take a good look at your page load times and do whatever you can to improve them.