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Page speed matters more than you think it does. Today, people simply won’t wait for a page to load on a desktop or mobile device, their priority is speed and convenience.
Having said that, while user experience is important, page speed also greatly affects SEO. Google uses page speed as one of its grading factors when trying to rank a website. This means that if your site is slow, it won’t rank as highly as it could. This could be especially detrimental to businesses that are just starting out.
There are dozens of reasons why your site may be slow. It can be due to your website hosting plan, cumbersome code in your website, uncompressed images, and many more reasons.
There are a number of pagespeed insight tools that will help you figure out why your site is slow and what you can do to improve it.
Read on to discover the top tools you can use to make your site faster.
1. Google PageSpeed Insight
By now you know that it's important to generate website traffic. Page speed helps keep people there.
If you’re going to test your site’s loading time, you might as well start with Google. You’ll get a score from 0-100, with 100 being a perfect score. An 85 or above means that your site is in good shape overall.
You want to pay attention to the mobile results. If most people access your site on mobile devices, you want to make sure you take the suggestions provided and improve the customer experience for your visitors.
2. GTMetrix
GTMetrix allows you to test the loading speed of your website from various locations. This can give you additional data to consider if you have visitors around the country and beyond.
All you have to do is sign up for a free account to get a lot of additional testing resources. You can test by browser, connection types, and video playback to see where your site is slowing down.
You get a lot of data in these reports. You’re scored on an A-F scale, with the report breakdowns across five sections.
3. Pingdom
Pingdom is another popular tool because of its in-depth reporting. You get insights as to which parts of the website take the longest to load. There may be a script in your website’s code that slows things down.
You can also test from several locations including Sweden, Australia, and California.
4. KeyCDN Website Speed Test
KeyCDN built this pagespeed insight tool to encourage people to signup for its CDN service. You’ll see the number of requests made to the server, the size of the file, and the total time to load the site.
Similar to Pingdom, you’ll see a breakdown of what parts of your webpage took the longest to load.
5. WebPage Test
While this isn’t the best-looking website testing page, it ranks among the most useful. The big advantage here is that you can choose specific devices and browsers to test.
This is great if you know that a lot of your visitors use specific mobile devices to access your site.
The Next Steps
Now that you have all of this information about your website speed, what do you do with it? These pagespeed insight tools give you a lot of information, and some of it can be a bit technical.
It’s important to remember that you don’t need to get a perfect 100 score, especially if it’s at the expense of the user experience. Focus on making improvements and raising your score.
Do you have any questions? Is there another topic you would like some more detail on? Let us know in the comments below!
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