Over the last few months Google has continued to focus on performance as a key message to developers. From their “Let’s make the web faster” initiative on Google Code, to their public DNS service, to the constant focus on performance by their Chief Performance guru, Steve Souders, it’s clear that Google wants people to have a faster experience on the web.

This makes sense: the faster the web, the more people will use it and be more likely to search and click on ads. In fact, in an interview with Web Pro News in November last year, Matt Cutts (head of Google’s webspam team) casually mentioned that in 2010 Google may give search ranking preference to sites that load faster. Om Malik went on to discuss whether this was a good idea or not.

More recently, Google opened up a new “Labs” feature in their Google Webmaster Tools that actually shows you the performance of your site as measured by the Googlebot. This move is further evidence that Google is indeed going to shift to making performance part of it’s ranking routine if it hasn’t already. See a screenshot of what you can expect to see:

In addition to the above chart, there is also some basic analysis and recommendations on how to improve performance, similar to what Page Speed and YSlow recommend. While it is a good start and provides the clearest view of how Google perceives your site’s performance, the data is still rather basic.

As such, when measuring and optimizing page load times we’d still recommend you work with a more in-depth tool such as Page Speed and YSlow. And, of course, for website monitoring and website load testing, we’d have to recommend BrowserMob

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Firebug · Google · Google Public DNS · Page Speed · Performance · YSlow

We’re excited about Amazon’s new AWS location. So much so we’ve already started development to bring its benefits to our customers by next week. As such, we had to quickly figure out how to adapt our tools to work with it.

In their announcement, Amazon stated that Elasticfox already worked with the new location. While that’s true, if you tried looking for a new Elasticfox release you’d be in for a surprise: there isn’t one. That’s because it doesn’t need an update to work.

Instead, just fire up your existing Elasticfox installation and click on the Regions button in the upper left corner:

Then add new region with the following endpoint details:

• Name = us-west-1
• URL = https://us-west-1.ec2.amazonaws.com

That’s all there is to it. You’re now ready to use the new location with Elasticfox!

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