Quick, think of the last time you weren't in a hurry. My guess is that you had to ponder to come up with an example. Almost everything in our society is based around speed. How fast can we get from point A -- to point B?

The internet is no exception, in fact it's probably the poster boy of 'being in a hurry'. One of my web design teachers in college always said to try and optimize your site to load in 3-4 seconds. After that, you run the risk of losing 50-60% of your potential visitors.

I'm not sure how exact his figures were, but the lesson remains. When creating your site, load times should be what you're checking most often. Now, Google has released a tool that could greatly help you increase the performance of your site -- Page Speed.

The tool was announced in Google's Code Blog yesterday, and is their answer to YSlow. Page Speed, like YSlow is a Firefox add-on that is integrated through Firebug. All you have to do is run Page Speed on the page you want to check, then the program provides suggestions on how to make it run faster. For example, it might optimize an image for you or identify issues with your code.

If anyone has tried it out, I'd like to hear back. Is Page Speed worth using over YSlow? Do you see it catching on and being a home run like other Google tools?

The ideas presented in the WebProWorld newsletter editor's note do not reflect the thoughts, and ideas of the WebProWorld community.

| JohnnyV |