Site speed reflects how quickly a website responds to web requests. Speeding up websites is important — not just to site owners, but to all Internet users. Faster sites create happy users and we’ve seen in our internal studies that when a site responds slowly, visitors spend less time there.

While that may seem like an exaggeration, according to the latest industry data, the need for speed is alive and well in the hearts of internet users and search engine crawlers.

Throughout the past several years, as network connectivity strengthens in both landline and mobile infrastructures, the expectations of both users and Google have simultaneously strengthened toward speed. As we push deeper into the 21st Century, one thing remains clear: the era of sluggish website performance is over.

Although there are literally dozens, if not hundreds, of tools and techniques geared toward boosting website speed and page load times, these are useless if you aren’t sure where your site actually stands.