Quite a lot has been said and mentioned about the website speed and why it is all that important. Let’s face it, we hate it when a website takes it forever to load. However, the good news is that we also have a quick fix solution to this: gtmetrix. But what is gtmetrix and why has it grown so relevant in recent times? Let us dive right into it and explore a bit about the topic.
The Website Speed: Its Importance
The website speed is vital for the overall performance of a website. Not only does it offer a good user experience, but it also ensures that your website enjoys a good online presence. So, how exactly does a website speed ‘function’ and where does a tool like the GTmetrix come into the picture? Well, let us take a look; but first let us take a look at what exactly do we mean by the website speed.
The term ‘Website Speed’ implies the site performance or the page load speed. It refers to how quickly a website page can load once you visit it. Or one could also consider it as the time that a website encompasses for the entire content to be fully displayed. This also includes: the images, the graphics, scripts, and all the other elements that make up the entire website.
Now, speaking of the website speed; there are quite a few important factors that influence its speed, such as: the size of the website, type of the website, web hosting, and also the user’s connection speed. Here, the speed of the website is quite critical when it comes to the performance of the site. The other aspects which are also influenced by the same are SEO rankings, user experience and others.
Website Speed and User’s Experience
As mentioned earlier, the website speed is quite important when it comes to offering a good user’s experience. This is mainly because the user’s wish to enjoy the website to load easily and swiftly. Any delay in the load time can cause the user’s to abandon a particular website, hence impacting the bounce rate.
The website speed, as mentioned previously, is a major factor when it comes to the Search Engine Optimization-SEO ranking. Hence it has been recommended to invest in a reliable and efficient site speed improving tool, such as GTmetrix.
GTmetrix is one of the most popular tools when it comes to helping your website achieve a better rank online. It functions by comprehensively analyzing the overall performance of your website. It helps by providing you with valuable insight that can help enhance the performance when implementing the SEO applications. Some of the prime metric that are applied by GTmetrix are:
First Byte (TTFB)First Contentful Paint (FCP)Time to Interactive (TTI)Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)Total Blocking Time (TBT) Speed Index.
By getting details regarding the current status of the metric, you can always enhance the rankings of your website.
GTmetrix: The Main Features
Let us take a look at some of the main features of the GTmetrix:
Performance Analysis: Gtmetrix offers the in-depth analysis of the load speed of the website by using tools such as: Total Blocking Time (TBT), Google Lighthouse metrics, including Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS),Speed Index and Time to Interactive (TTI).
Page Performance Insights: Just providing scores is not enough, GTmetrix goes an extra mile by offering to you relevant recommendations to help improve the performance of the website. Not only are these recommendations relevant, but also easy to implement and ensure the required results.
Video Playback: With the help of GTmetrix, you can also record the video of your page load. This allows you to check out to see what your visitors view. This helps recognise any visual problems that can not be ‘noticed’ by simple petrics alone.
Waterfall Chart: This feature offers visual representation of the loading time of your website. This way you can easily take note of the problem areas as displayed on the waterfall chart. The waterfall chart is perhaps one of the most important aspects of GTmetrix that can help improve the performance and speed of your website.
Historical Tracking: This is the tracking the performance of your website overtime. This works by displaying to you the impact of the changes that you make and can also identify the trends or any recurring problems.
CONCLUSION
So, you see, GTmetrix is one of the most popular speed enhancing tools for a reason. The best part is that you can select either from the ‘Free plan’ or the ‘Pro Plan’. By implementing the changes as recommended by GTmetrix, you can easily enhance the working of the website. This is done by taking into account the various optimization strategies.