A recent video posted onto the Google Webmaster Central Youtube Channel and highlighted by Search Engine Land shows Matt Cutts setting out how Google determines page speed.

Within the video, Matt Cutts explains that around 1 out of 100 searches carried out on Google are affected by slow page speed and this amounts to roughly 1 in every 1000 websites that have an issue with site speed.

If your website is slow then Google isn’t the only one who will potentially penalise it, as your site visitors are unlikely to wait around either, which will directly affect the number of enquiries or sales that you receive.

It has been a busy couple of months here at WebDepend. We’ve been working hard testing ecommerce sites, testing websites in brand new browsers including IE9 and Firefox 4 plus testing a variety of digital projects for a well known operator in the leisure industry.

But as you can tell, that’s not the subject of this blog post. Website monitoring is the topic and I don’t mean the boring kind that pings your site every 5 minutes and alerts you if it is down, although it is definitely worthwhile to have at least some kind of monitoring in place.