Here are over 10 best online tools which you can test your blog or websites speed performance and get recommendation on how to improve the loading speed.

We don’t know how much is exactly the weightage of  a website loading speed in the Google SEO ranking algorithm but the sake of visitors browsing experience alone is important enough for us to take our website speed performance seriously.  Before we do any optimization, it’s a good idea to note down the ‘before and after’ results for comparison purpose. Some of the site speed testing website below allow you to create an account which you can record all your testing for future reference.  Testing your blog for speed also good for benchmarking purpose and most of the testing services below give you a grading score based on their own or some standard grading like Pagespeed or YSlow.

Here are several website testing service sites you can test your blog straight away.

1. http://gtmetrix.com/

“GTmetrix can help you develop a faster, more efficient, and all-around improved website experience for your users.”

GTmetrix  is one of the most comprehensive of all. It gives you: Page Speed  and YSlow grading, test server option, mobile testing etc.
You can download a full result report including the  recommendation details in PDF format.  WordPress plugin also available for before and after optimization  comparison.  Also,  you can register a free account to monitor your website.

2. http://www.webpagetest.org/

“Webpagetest will provide rich diagnostic information including resource loading waterfall charts, Page Speed optimization checks and suggestions for improvements.”

Webpagetest is an open source project supported by Google.  One of the most comprehensive, it include options for test server, speed connection,  mobile connection etc.  You can create an account for your website testing history.

3. http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/

“We built this Full Page Test tool to help you analyze the load speed of your websites and learn how to make them faster. It lets you identify what about a web page is fast, slow, too big, what best practices you’re not following, and so on. We have tried to make it useful both to experts and novices alike.”

Pingdom gives you a few test server option and you can create a free account to monitor you website uptime and performance.

4. https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/

“Analyze and optimize your website with PageSpeed tools to implement the web performance best practices. PageSpeed Insights analyzes the content of a web page, then generates suggestions to make that page faster. Reducing page load times can reduce bounce rates and increase conversion rates.”

PageSpeed is a website testing tool  from Google herself. With desktop and mobile testing. the result is fast to get quick speed optimization suggestions.

5. http://www.yottaa.com/

“Assess and benchmark your site performance, and learn how to improve it.”

A quick test from different locations and with optimization suggestions.  You can create a account for free performance monitoring of you website. Free trial for its Optimizer (its premium service) available.   You also can access Yotta tools at here:  http://www.websitetest.com

6. http://www.showslow.com/

“Show Slow is an open source tool that helps monitor various website performance metrics over time. It captures the results of YSlow, Page Speed, WebPageTest and dynaTrace AJAX Edition rankings and graphs them, to help you understand how various changes to your site affect its performance.”

You create a free account for your website testing history

7. http://www.neustar.biz/enterprise/web-performance

“Identify. Diagnose. Remediate. Repeat. Neustar Web Performance is the platform that helps your team remove user barriers and optimize your website.”

A quick simple test.  Also provide website load testing.

A comprehensive test available with a premium account (free trial available)

Here are several other good website you can try:
http://loads.in/
A simple test but can choose the test location and browser. With waterfall chart.

http://mobitest.akamai.com/m/index.cgi
Great for testing mobile version of your website

http://loadimpact.com/
A website load performance testing.  You can create an account.

Here are some other online website testing for a quick test (without speed improvement suggestions):

http://www.gomeznetworks.com/custom/instant_test.html (Simple test but can choose server)

http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/

http://webwait.com/

http://www.vertain.com/?sst

http://whichloadsfaster.com  (to compare 2 websites side by side)

The above listing are the best websites available for website speed performance testing. One among that I like is Gtmetrix, but feel free to try them one by one, the testing doesn’t take long. One thing is that most of the websites above give grading or assessment based on their own system, so the results might be very varied. Lotta for example gave a very low grade for this blog but the grade by Gtmetrix and Websitetest doesn’t differ much.

Thank you for visiting this blog. Feel free to leave some useful comments. Happy blog testing!

This post is the English version of my own article in Malay Language at:  Cara nak uji kelajuan blog

From: Over 10 Best Websites To Test Your Blog Speed Performance

Here is a free automatic link submission service to submit your website or blog link to 100 directories.

Update 10/2012 – The link submitter website is not available anymore.

There are probably several other online website submitters you can use to submit link to directories, the different with one is that it is fully automatic. Once your fill up the details you can quickly click submit and the let the link submitter work by itself. You don’t even need to enter captcha.

This free link submitter can get you get one way linking link from directories, pointing to your blog.  Registration is free, and each new website you sign up, will receive free unrestricted access to submit to 100 one way web directories.  No reciprocal link needed. If you want to submit to the whole list of 800+ directories, you need to pay only $20 one-off per web site for unlimited directory submissions. There are also regular submission packages.

Once account created, just add a campaign for each of your website or blog to submit. You need to install a Firefox extension given by the website for this auto submission. Once installed, click START for your campaign and leave the window open for submission.  Once completed, check your email for confirmation link.

Tested with 2 campaign, the result is varied, one of the website successfully submitted to over 60 directories and another one of them only to 29 directories. Probably need to re-submit due to some of the directories might be down.

Now, should you very worry about being penalized by Google for massive sudden linking?  No, I don’t thnk so. 50 to 100 links from directories is nothing and it is not that you will get a sudden surge of one-way linking from 50-100 directories. The directories take time to approve your link, some may approve within a few days some may within many months.

This free back link submitter to 100 directories can save your time. Read more details or register here:  TheLinkSubmitter

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From: Free Automatic Link Submission To Directories

How to get free CDN service for your blog. Choices of totally free CDN service to use. What is CDN and why do you need it?

CDN stand for Content Delivery Network. What CDN does is to deliver content (partial or all, depends on the service) of your website from their server instead of direct from your web hosting server. This will make your site loading faster because the content is deliver from a server closer to the visitor. If your blog is hosted in US then your blog will load faster for the visitor from South East Asia if the content is deliver from a server in South East Asia instead of from your blog hosting server in US. Basically, CDN make your blog load faster for international visitors from every corner of the world. With CDN you will have many mirrors of you blog all over in a global network.

Do you need it? Yes. If your blog is for international audience, consider CDN as a must. Now, if your blog is for local audience, say if your blog hosted in Malaysia and your target audience is also from Malaysia, well, maybe you don’t need CDN. Still you want to consider CDN because CDN may have other features that could make your blog load faster and safer such as caching, minifying, hotlinking guard, parallel request,  and security.

You might not realize that you may already using certain type of CDN in a minor scale. For example if you installed certain bookmarklet service such as from addthis.com or sharethis.com, the files (script and images) already deliver from global CDNs instead of directly from their server.

Here is the list of free CDN you can choose:

Free CoralCDN

Coral CDN uses peer to peer distribution network. Get the info at: Free CoralCDN. This is a unique way of delivering your site. You just append nyud.net at the end of your website url and your website content will be delivered from their network cache. Try it now, type in your blog url to internet browser but add nyud.net at the end of the url. For example, this blog url is http://www.blogging4ever.com, by entering http://www.blogging4ever.com.nyud.net this blog will be delivered from one of Coral CDN network.

To use CoralCDN  for good you need to configure the  DNS server to point to CoralCDN.  It hardly explained on the CoralCDN website on how to do that. It easier to just point your CSS, JavaScript and images to CoralCDN.  There are wordpress plugin to do the job. You  can set up your blog to use Coral CDN easily by installing a word press plugin at CoralCDN WordPress Plugin or at Coralize plugin

The first WordPress plugin last update was 25/12/2009 although it says it compatible with wordpress 3.1.3. The second plugin is older. That’s the reason I don’t really recommend this but I love the peer to peer  distribution method, let’s watch how it develop. It’s suprisingly fast!

Free Cloudflare CDN

I definitely suggest Clouflare for your Free CDN need. Not only it is easier to set up, Cloudflare has some awesome features that are even more than some paid CDN providers provide. Some of extra features are the security and the statistics (superb!). I could write another article on Cloudflare alone but I suggest you pay them visit. Well documented.

How to set up Cloudflare? The configuration page is very user friendly, I think you can do it within minutes. The only thing that might slightly difficult for newbie is that you need to change your current webhosting DNS server to point to the one provided by Cloudflare, this is fully explained on the website.  From my experience it take less than 12 hrs for your website to fully deliver from Cloudflare after the set up completed. (tips – suggest you set the security to ‘false’ first and try other setting after every thing works okay, probably “security too tight ” -  a very common issue with Cloudflare could arise).

Using Dropbox network

You can use public Dropbox (a cloud based file sharing/storage) network via a WordPress plugin. Get the plugin for WordPress to set up with Dropbox at Dropbox WordPress Plugin.  The plugin allows you to upload your themes CSS, JavaScript, and Images into your Dropbox ‘public’ folder and serve these files from the Dropbox network. Be prepare to get your hand dirty with a little coding.

Dropbox itself  is awesome cloud file sharing/storage tools, using it for content delivery is quite a nice hack. Check it out.

Using Google network

This is a D-I-Y method which you use Google Apps to make your own CDN. Well, this look like a metaphysic science to me. A lot of work to do compare with other method. Yes, get your hands dirty with some coding. You need to download developer files first to create the apps. For those (geeky you) want to try this, you can read the tutorial at 24ways.org or or at digitalistic.com

FreeCast (multimedia – audio video streaming)

Broadcast your audio video stream with this P2P network. Interesting, you can broadcast from your PC easily by installing the FreeCast software. This is a specialized Content Delivery Network solution, hit on to FreeCast Broadcaster for the info.

Speedy mirror (free for the first 50 gb)

Easy to install and with easy to follow instruction. You can choose using sub-domain method and/or change the DNS server setting (similar to Cloudflare).  SpeedyMirror is free only for first 50 Gig.  This made Speedymirror the first CDN provider you might want to use first before making full commitment.  That will give a good estimation of how much monthly data your website need. See how long 50 GB data will last for your blog. 50 GB is a lot of data, maybe good enough for many months (depends on website traffic and contents). You can purchase additional bandwidth after 50 GB has used up.

Update Sept 2012 – Speedymirrorwebsite not available anymore.

Exabytes Free Lifetime CDN

This is a great free CDN limited offer you don’t want to miss. Free Lifetime 25 Gig monthly Free CDN. Really? Yes! If your blog uses not more than 25 Gig per month then you don’t need to pay a single  cent. You need to pay only if you use more than 25 Gig. Easy to configure with a lot of features too. If you have a website or blog with NOT super-duper on traffic just like mine, good chance 25 Gig is more than enough for you. Dude, hurry up for this. The offer will not last 4ever. Run, don’t crawl. Rush to exabytes and use this coupon code : FREECDN for the life-time free monthly 25 Gig.

Update 09/2012 The Free CDN is not available anymore.

There is a so-called D-I-Y CDN creation method  which involves creating a sub domain and then put the JavaScript, images, css files etc to the sub domain so those files will be delivered from the subdomain. The idea for this technique is to create parallel downloading when requested by internet browser to make the website loading faster. Well, although it is a Content Delivery too but it’s hardly Networked because there is no network of global server involved at all.

Oh, I could write longer on this CDN stuffs but this article has become lengthy that it’s better for me to bore you with another  post on CDN next time .

I hope you will find the right one for you (I mean the CDN not your sweetheart!). Well, sleep sounder now, knowing that your blogs will be loading faster for your  lovely visitors from all corners of  the earth.

Note: After CDN installation, you might feel like there’s no difference in the loading speed. No need to be peculiar. Actually, that’s for your own visit, probably your web hosting  server already close to you in the first place, but the visitor from other location should feel a very big difference. If you stay on the North Pole you might want to ask your friend on the South Pole about that.

Search Engine:

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From: How To Get Free CDN To Speed Up Your Blog

Download Free edition of Tweek Attack for your Twitter marketing purpose.

Update 10/2012 Tweeattack is  not available anymore  – I believe so there are some legal issue with Twitter.

Tweetattack is a very popular Twitter marketing software among Internet Marketers.   This is the tool you need in your arsenal if you use Twitter as your major marketing platform. The features of Tweetattack is impressive. One of the best feature is the auto retweet feature which  can retweet link to thousand of accounts and authority and backlinks from tweet statistic websites (wow!). You can check it out here: Tweetattack.

However, if your need is just to manage “follower and following” then the free edition of Tweet Attack is good enough. Highly suggested to use if you have more than one account with Twitter – it’s useful and faster than using web tools.  What this Tweet Attack free edition can do?

Below is what as written on the Tweetattack website:

Do you use many twitter accounts and want to build followers in all of them? Its hard to do that manually and you should at least automate it using our free twitter marketing software. Yes you can get it here for FREE. This includes a crash course about twitter marketing that you cannot get anywhere else.

This free twitter marketing software have the following features:

It can follow users from search results
It can follow users from other users followers list
It can follow users from other users following list
It can follow users listed in a text file
Not using API
Check accounts following and follower counts
Check accounts if suspended
Check accounts if protected
It can unfollow those who don’t follow you back.

You can download it directly here: Tweetattack download.  Install and complete the free registration with your email to validate the software. Alternatively, you can visit Tweet attack and scroll down to the bottom for the free edition download.

Happy Tweeting!

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From: Get Tweetattack Twitter Marketing Software Free Edition

Free automatic online submission service to 25 social bookmarking websites.

Submitting your blog post link to various social bookmarking websites is  a tedious process. It is okay to submit to a few major social bookmarking site manually but to submit to a lot more, then you need to spend a lot of your precious time which probably better use to write articles.

One of the  common method to submit your story link  is by using browser bookmarklet add-on such as provided by  Addthis or Sharethis. Google browser add-on toolbar also has a built-in sharing bookmarklet too. These browser add-on do make your job easier but still you need to spend a lot of time doing it. Is there is a better way?

There are several link building service website (and individuals too)  that offer this type of service but they are not free and quite costly for a new blogger.  Here is the good news, there is a website than provide free social story submission and bookmarking service you can use straight away.  You can submit one link to 25 social bookmarking sites per day for free. When I said free, it’s really free. You can register within minutes and start submitting your stories.

With this service you can submit one link per day to 25 bookmarking site for free.  They offer premium service too where you scan submit 3 links per day to 100 bookmarking sites. It’s very easy to use the service.  After logged-in, click the SUBMIT button and fill up the submission form. (see the screenshot below) You just need to fill in the  link url, title, description and tag.  You can spin the title, description and  tag too. Then click SUBMIT  button. You can check the submission by clicking the REPORT button in the menu.

Hurry, before they close their free service ,  go register right now at here: Free Bookmarking Service

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From: Submit Link To 25 Bookmarking Sites Per Day For Free.

Your Facebook Fan Box (or like box) widget so slow to fully loaded? Been thinking yourself on how to speed Facebook Like Box widget loading?

Do you have a facebook fan box widget on your blog? Does it seem very slow to fully loaded? Here a solution if you are using WordPress blogging CMS.

Facebook Cache wordpress plugin use caching technique to speed up the widget loading. In fact from what I know of, this is the only wordpress plugin that can do that. You might say there is another plugin that can cache widget, that is Widget Cache. I have tried Widget Cache and it didn’t do any caching or any noticeably improvement on Facebook widget loading.

Facebook Cache Features:

* Reduce page load time on pages that would normally contain your iframe or FBML code

* Shortcode for embedding into a page

* FB Cache Widget (Default 240px wide)

* Manual Cache Refresh

You can download it here: Facebook Cache Plugin. You can read the instruction at the developer site : Electriceasel

Try it yourself. You shall notice a great improvement on Facebook Fan Box widget loading speed.

Now, where is Google Social Connect widget cache? Google includes website loading speed in it search engine result algorithm. Also, Google suggest to use Page Speed tool to inspect our website loading speed and turned out one of the slowest loading component is Google Social Connect widget itself!

Search Engine:

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From: Speed Up Facebook Fan Like Box Widget Loading Plugin

Splog and auto blog IM take notes: With +1 button, Google has more than website popularity metric in mind. That beside a few other thing introduced by Google recently.

Google new experimental +1 voting button is said the Google’s answer to Facebook’s like. Definitely both will measure the popularity of a website or an article page but Google has more than popularity metric in mind.

‘Splog’ that tend to appear high on search result is one of the complain that Google received the most. That’s beside ‘tell me Google, why my blog doesn’t appear on the first result page” . Google has been trying hard tackling this issue. Many times splogs can appear high in search engine result and this make searching less comfortable experience to users.

According to wikipedia splogs are where the articles are fake, and are only created for search engine spamming. Splog (spam blog) can be a website which normally contains articles or excerpt culled from other blog websites.

Most intenet marketer know this well, the articles could be taken from articles syndicated website and then add some spinning so the article ‘appear’ different from the original. There is also another type of website which is refered by internet marketer as ‘autoblog’ which actually website that automatically scrape contents and articles from other blogs and just display the excepts (mostly in a list). With many internet ‘make money online‘ Gurus still saying autoblog as one the best supplementary online income, I don’t think ‘autoblog’ will disappear soon.

A splog (spam blog) is a fake blog created solely to promote affiliated Web sites, with the intent of skewing search results and artificially boosting traffic. Some splogs are written like long-winded ads for the Web sites they promote; others have no original content, featuring either nonsense or content stolen from authentic Web sites. Splogs include huge numbers of links to the Web sites in question to fool Web crawler s (programs that search the Web for sites to index). The sploggers associate popular search keywords with their pages so that the splog links turn up in blog search results and are sent out as search subscription notifications through e-mail and RSS feed. Read full article at: techtarget

Google are combating this type of search results in order to bring a better search result for internet user. By including the +1 vote button into search ranking algorithm will help Google to give better ranking to website voted rather than to those splogs. This is with the expectation that splogs shall get less vote than normal blog with original writing.

Not just on the recent +1 button, in December last Google has announced of their intention to implement a couple of thing on copyright infringement issue. Read it here: Making Copyright Better

Also, early this year Google announced their attitude on high quality sites. Read it here: Google High Quality Sites

Combating this issue is not an easy task. As you can see, many splogs still ranking high on search engine result. Look like Google need user participation to help them bring better result. Similar voting extension tool also available for Chrome but it more of a voting tool for ‘unpopularity’. Get it here: Chrome Extension. So now, rather than a user keep on complaining now he/she can do something about it.

To start using Google +1 button (to promote your own blog maybe ) you need to opt in for Google experiment. Log in to Google account and then visit Google +1 to join the experiment (see the photo below). Note that the +1 button is still in experimental stage, not everybody will see the +1 button. You need to wait until Google allow you.

So far Google is happy with the +1 button result and soon blogmaster can get +1 button to install on blog. similar to other social sharing/bookmarking button such as Google Buzz or Facebook Like button. Btw, I dont think Google will come out with -1 button after the success of +button)

If you think about it, Google can too easily de-index any website, say a website with copyright infringement contents (so that website will not appear at all in search result) but then Google is a search engine not a cyber police.

Update 02/05/11:

Now you can get Google +1 button to install to your blog at Google +1

From: Join Google +1 Vote Button and Autoblog Splog