This is even more important since Google decided to include landing page load times in its Quality Score criteria earlier this year, meaning that advertisers pay more for poorly performing pages.

This means that you need to test the loading speed of your landing pages, to see if there are any issues you need to deal with.. [More]

54 out of the US top 100 websites fail Yahoo’s performance test

May 29, 2008. We have used Yslow, Yahoo’s performance plugin to Firefox, to analyze the performance of the top 100 websites in the US according to Alexa. The results were both surprising and interesting.

Yslow will rank websites using 13 different criteria that are known to affect website performance, such as the number of HTTP request, how scripts and CSS are handled, etc. The performance grades are A, B, C, D and F (for fail), with A being the best.. [More]

Even website hosting companies have too little uptime

Utrecht, 5 February 2007 – Research carried out by WatchMouse, the Dutch site and server monitoring company, has revealed that many website hosting companies are not achieving optimum performance in terms of uptime. During the months November and December 2006, the company registered the average loading times and availability of the sites of eleven website hosting companies. Leaseweb, Rackspace and WideXS came out on top.. [More]

Social networks uptime should improve 

Amsterdam - April 29, 2008 - Uptrends.com ( www.uptrends.com ) the leading remote website and server monitoring company, today reported that some social networks experience serious downtime and are not available for visitors. Four of the twenty two social networks had an uptime of 99.9 percent which is good. Eleven had an uptime of 100 percent which is excellent. The social network which was not available for more than 20 hours during the last 30 days is Blackplanet.com. This social network had an uptime of 97.2 percent.. [More]