How to check the speed of your website
There has never been a more important time to have a fast site. Thanks to the huge rise in mobile browsers, having a speedy website is no longer an option, it’s absolutely crucial to your success. It’s so important that Google is even starting to use page speed as a ranking factor.
The result is that slow sites are now getting demoted in Google’s rankings in favor of websites that load much faster. The idea is that slow loading pages create a bad user experience, and Google wants to give users the best experience possible. They don’t want to promote slow websites as a result.
Speeding up your website can have a huge impact to your business. It won’t just improve your rankings, it could also improve the way in which users interact with your website, increasing revenue as a result.
Testing your website speed with online tools
Don’t know how fast your website loads? Don’t worry, no one does until they test it. Luckily, there are several online tools that you can use to test your site speed and get recommendations on how to make your pages load quicker.
Google PageSpeed Insights
As you’d expect from a company that wants you to have a rapid website, Google has its own page speed tool. PageSpeed Insights will give your website a rating from 0 to 100 for both the mobile and desktop versions. It will then provide a list of suggested improvements that you can make to speed up your site.
One of these is likely to be smaller images. The size of images plays a big role in how long it takes your website to load. Handily, Google provides optimized images that you can download there and then.
Pingdom
Google PageSpeed Insights is great. But other tools can give you a more detailed look at how fast your website is and what exactly is slowing it down. One of these is Pingdom. On Pingdom, you can test the speed of your website from several places around the world, including Sweden, Australia and the U.S. This is particularly useful for global sites that want to reach customers across the world. Pingdom will also give your website a rating and it will demonstrate how long every element and files took to load. This can be used to highlight the files that have the largest load time so that you can optimize them later.
Web Page Test
If you want to get an idea of how long your website takes to load in Chrome, Safari or any other browser, Web Page Test is the tool to use. It’s not as detailed as the other two tools, but it’s great for multi-browser testing.
Don’t just use one of these tools. To get the most complete review of your site and identify all of the issues that are slowing it down, you should be using them all. If your page is still loading slowly (more than three seconds) after making all of the recommended changes, get in touch to see how we can help.
