If you click on the Crawl tab on the side bar of GWT, you’ll see a link for robots.txt Tester.
Robots.txt Tester page displays whether you have errors or warnings in your robots.txt file. Sometimes a webmaster may add something to the robots.txt that may disallow Googlebot from accessing your site so your entire website may get de-indexed. It is good to check this page every once in a while.
Filed under: Documentation→Website Performance
Tags: google webmaster tools, gwt, robots.txt, robots.txt test, website performance
If you click on the Crawl tab on the side bar of GWT, you’ll see a link for Sitemaps.
Sitemaps helps search engine bots crawl and categorize your site better. If you have a sitemap or multiple sitemaps for your website, you can add them on the Sitemaps page of Google Webmaster Tools.
There is also the option to test your sitemap for errors.
On the Sitemaps page you’ll find the amount of webpages submitted from your sitemaps the the amount of webpages indexed by Googlebot.
Filed under: Documentation→Website Performance
Tags: google webmaster tools, gwt, sitemaps, website performance
If you click on the Crawl tab on the side bar of GWT, you’ll see a link for URL Parameters.
URL parameters helps Googlebot crawl your website more efficiently by removing duplicates and saves bandwidth. More than likely, you won’t need to do anything with URL Parameters. This is an advance feature that is described in the video below:
Filed under: Documentation→Website Performance
Tags: google webmaster tools, gwt, URL Parameters, website performance
Click on the Security Issues tab on the side bar of GWT.
The Security Issues pages lets you know of any known security issues with your site. If you visit your website and get a malware warning from your browser, it is likely that your website is referencing code or content from another website that has malware.
If your site has been hacked or compromised, the search results of your website on Google will show up with “This site may harm your computer.” Or “This site may be hacked.” This will avoid people from visiting your website. It is important to check the Security Issues tab regularly to see whether Google has marked your site as being hacked.
There are numerous things that can cause your site to be compromised such as: server configuration, SQL injection, code injection, error template, binary malware, content injection and URL injection. One way to address these issues is by locating the problematic content and removing it.
Filed under: Documentation→Website Performance
Tags: google webmaster tools, gwt, hackers, malware, security issues, sql injection, url injection, website performance
To analyze your webpage online using Google PageSpeed you can go to:
https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
You can also analyze your webpage from your Chrome browser by downloading the plugin:
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/pagespeed-insights-by-goo/gplegfbjlmmehdoakndmohflojccocli?hl=en
After installing the plugin, you can analyze a page by going to your browser’s customize and control dropdown menu. Go to “More tools” and click on “Developer tools”.
Click on “Pagespeed” tab at the top of the developer tools and click on “Analyze” to analyze the page you’re on.
Filed under: Documentation→Website Performance
Tags: analyze webpage, google pagespeed, pagespeed insights, website performance
To increase your page speed, you should try your best to avoid or minimize redirects on your website. If a mobile user goes to example.com and it redirects them to www.example.com then redirects them to m.example.com, the user will experience slow page loads. Having a landing page that redirects multiple times to the final landing page will slow your page speed. Instead, you can design your website so that example.com uses a responsive design with different break points for desktops, tablets and mobile devices.
Filed under: Documentation→Website Performance
Tags: avoid redirects, minimize redirects, page speed, redirects, website performance
To increase your page speed, you should enable some sort of compression for your website. Most modern browsers support gzip compression. Enabling compression will reduce the size transferred response by up to 90%, reduce the client’s data usage and improve the time to render your pages.
It is recommended to enable text compression with GZIP on your web server.
Filed under: Documentation→Website Performance
Tags: enable compression, GZIP, page speed, website performance
There are many potential factors that may slow down the response time of your server. Some causes could be slow application logic, slow database queries, slow routing, frameworks, libraries, resource CPU starvation or memory starvation.
If you believe your slow response time is due to CPU or memory, you may think about upgrading your web server. It is important to reduce your server response time to less than 200ms.
Filed under: Documentation→Website Performance
Tags: page speed, server response time, website performance
Fetching resources between the client and server can be very slow and expensive for the visitor. To increase your page speed, you should always consider using caching to help determine whether the browser can reuse a previously fetched resource.
Filed under: Documentation→Website Performance
Tags: browser caching, page speed, website performance
Minifying resources is when you remove unnecessary or redundant data without affecting how the page is shown by the browser. For instance, you can create a header.php page and include it to all your pages instead of having duplicates of the header on every page. You can also remove comments in your code, remove unused code and use shorter variables and function names to improve your page speed.
Filed under: Documentation→Website Performance
Tags: minified, minify, minifying resources, page speed, website performance