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It's a beautiful summer's afternoon here in Queensland. The sun is shining, the birds are singing and there's a nice cool breeze blowing across our back deck and that's where Steve and I are right now. We've had a fairly crazy week and even yesterday was fairly intense with work and no time for play.

But today is different ... sure I might be sitting here writing tomorrow's column but I've also been spending some time reading and thinking and just letting my brain and body unwind from all the stresses of this past week.

Tomorrow I'll be down in the state capital doing business with some importers but today I'm kicking back and just enjoying the warmth and some peace and quiet.

I hope you've had a chance to do that over the weekend too because, even though many of you guys who read this column work from home, that doesn't mean that your work is any less stressful than if you worked in a normal 9-5 type job.

In fact here, where most of us are self-employed, the pressure is almost always on because the only money we earn is what we make from our own efforts and sometimes those efforts don't make as much money as we might hope they did. And the pressure is always on to keep up with the latest trends in the industry and with the traffic that we need to keep coming to our sites.

One of the trends that seems to be increasing in importance for webmasters is the need to have sites that load quickly. Of course we've always known ... or at least we should have always known ... that if your site takes longer than a few seconds to load something that attracts the interest of surfers then they're gone.

They can't wait for your site to load ... they don't want to wait for your site to load ... they know that if your site doesn't load fast they can always hit the back button and escape to some other site that will load quickly. So if it's not up in three seconds they've "shot through" ... good Australian slang that means that they've left your site very quickly and they're not coming back.

But now there's another entity on the Web that is looking at loading speed ... now there's even more need for speed according to Google. From some time last year we began to hear rumblings that Google might start to grade sites on the speed at which they loaded and that grading would have some bearing on where a site might rank in the search engine results pages.

At the same time Google has been making some infrastructure changes to ensure that it returns faster search results than ever before and a lot of people have thought that Google's impending Caffeine update is going to have a lot to do with speed as well.

As late as last Friday Google had still not introduced Caffeine across all its data centers and it even confirmed that via Matt Cutts however that doesn't mean that we shouldn't be looking at how fast our sites load before Caffeine comes along.

And how do you tell just how fast your site does load? Well you can go to google.com/webmastercentral and log into your account there ... then pick any of your sites that you have registered ... click on the 'Labs' link and then click on the 'Site Performance' link.

Oh and be ready for a nasty surprise ... you just may find that some of your sites are loading like absolute dogs. Once you've seen how fast or slow they're loading then you have to work out why they might be loading so slowly and that can be a little hard ... or at least it is for us.

For example we have a WordPress blog that runs in a fairly complex magazine theme ... there are some scripts that make it look a bit fancy and there are plenty of images on the front page ... although Steve has worked hard to keep the file sizes of those images down.

According to Google that blog loads in 3.5 seconds and that's not too bad. But then there's another WordPress blog on the same server that loads in 8 seconds according to Google. It has less images and no fancy template or scripts yet according to Google it's really slow.

About the only thing we can put that down to is that it's an old WordPress installation that we've been meaning to update for over a year now.

Then there's a fairly simple client's site that's very light on graphics and runs in a Joomla CMS ... it's even slower than our slowest WordPress blog. Now is that caused by a Joomla problem or by something else? It's even slower than a fairly intensive front page of an e-commerce site that we host on our server that's running Avactis.

Unfortunately Google doesn't tell you ... it just shows you a graph that clearly tells you that the site is SLOW. So we're working on it and in the coming weeks we're going to be working on the loading speed of all of our sites.

So how fast are your sites loading? Don't measure it by looking at the response time from your server ... look at it through Google's 'eyes' because that's what is going to count if Google really does start grading sites based on loading speed.