Nowadays, internet users do not have patience when it comes to page loading times. However, they click on the link or input the URL, and wait only for 4-5 seconds. According to the Google study, 50% of users think likely a mobile site to load in 2 seconds, and 53% users are probable to abandon the page if it’s loading longer than 4 seconds.
As a result, you are susceptible to losing nearly half of your visitors. Therefore page speed plays an important role not only in ranking factor but also determines the conversion rates and draws more visitors.
Optimising your website for loading fast is necessary. However, firstly you require testing your website speed properly with tools like Google PageSpeed Insights, Pingdom, GtMetrix and many more.
Through this post, we will guide you tips to check your site and essential tools used for testing the website speed. So let’s have a look at the right way to run a website speed test with the use of tools to measure your website speed and track any improvements.
By following this guide, you will be capable of accelerating WordPress website, reducing the mobile and desktop loading times radically, and hence making it much easier to use.
However, if you do not have a WordPress website, don’t close the guide so far. Mostly speed optimisation techniques enlightened in this step-by-step post can be applied to any website.
If your website was created with monetisation in mind, whether it is an online e-commerce store or advertising digital marketing services, missing out on likely customers is by no means a good thing.
Therefore improve your page speed so that you should have a positive impact on your earnings.
Tools for measuring Website speed:
1. Google PageSpeed Insights
Page Speed Insights is a free tool presented to webmasters by Google. This is used to measure the loading speed of a website and estimated on a scale from 1 to 100. All CSS and JavaScript files, the HTML code, and any images get checked during the test.
Besides analysis, Page Speed Insights also gives optimisation guidelines. Every suggestion is a clickable link taking you to more recommendation on solving page speed concerns. You only need to enter your website URL and then click on Analyze.
The results are piled up by using the Lighthouse tool. It is an open-source, automatic tool designed to help get better the quality of web pages. Google PageSpeed Insights tool measures the performance of the website pages for both mobiles as well as desktop devices. However, if you get a score above 85, it indicates that your WebPages are performing correctly.
So if you aspire 100/100 on your website Google PageSpeed test, you need to take care of following elements-
Handling your Speed Issues
Website speed will always be an essential part if you want to improve your website performance. Also, this has been determinant in the Google PageSpeed updated test tool.
Thus, to ensure that you are taking care of all your website speed problems, you should consider how the themes and plugins, along with additional integrations, are affecting your site speed.
Investing in a trustworthy web hosting service is just as significant as the whole thing else in maintaining your website’s loading times. So, it is crucial on your part to make sure reading web hosting reviews before making the selection of your web host. Make sure that you are capable of applying every optimisation move that you can watch over.
Give value to visible content
When a visitor lands on your site, content gets visible to them without scrolling. Also recognised as above-the-fold content, this content must quickly load on the visitors’ ends since it is a component of user experience.
That’s why it is vital to ensure your HTML is presenting the content of your web page foremost before it is presenting other things. To get that completed, you can decrease the amount of data used by your resources or only form your HTML to load the critical, above-the-fold content first over other elements.
Code modification is necessary
If you can create your source code more compact, you can efficiently lean to the website speed and user experience matters arising out of it. To achieve this, you will require removing all the code that’s not wanted like white spaces, new lines, needless and unused code, excessive formatting, comments, and so on.
Modification is fundamental because it generates a smaller yet fast for the server version of your file. The three resources CSS, HTML, JavaScript require changes. You can use tools like HTML Minifier, CSSNano, and Closure compiler/Uglify JS to alter coding.
Disabling Cache
When you disable the cache, it permits you to take off the experience of a brand new visitor. Since the latest visitors need to download all your resources to cache it. This, in turn, will provide you view where your website stands in terms of load speed.
Enabling Capture Screenshots
Firstly click on the camera icon. This will offer you snapshots of the page loading progressions. You can observe how the new user experiences your website in increments until the page complete the entire load.
Toggle Linking Different Mobile Device Screens
A toggle device toolbar in the top left corner allocates you to clasp between several devices. Chrome has some preset device settings and allows you to edit to particular dimensions.
You can distinguish how your page loads on different screen resolutions and where you might be missing in either the desktop or mobile experience.
Toggle between different connection speeds
This throttling choice allows you to analysis how your website executes on various forms of internet connections. This is mainly helpful when testing for mobile. You can glimpse accurately how a new user experiences your website from home wifi and 4G or 3G connections.
Google revealed that the average mobile landing page loads in 22 seconds, which appeared astonishing at first but turned out to be right when testing some sites on 3G connections.
Optimise your images
We all recognise that optimising the images available on a website can assist us in making our sites quicker and swift to load. You can either select to manually optimise and compact the images on your website.
Alternatively, you could use image optimisation plugins for your WordPress site like Smuts it or EWWW Image optimiser. For your other websites, you can make use of image compression tools like TinyPNG, Compress JPEG, etc.
2. Gtmetrix
GT Metrix scores your page based on Google’s Page Speed Tests and YSlow criteria. After your test gets finish, you will get a grade that ranges from 0 to 100 and a detailed breakdown of the results, which include a waterfall, video, and history on top of PageSpeed and YSlow.
It will graphically signify how your website is loading, and you can spot the traffic jam faster. By default, it runs an analysis from Canada; however, if you do free registration, you will be capable to examine from Dallas, Hong Kong, London, Mumbai, Sydney, Sao Paulo.
This means you can test your website pages from seven different locations across the globe. Moreover, it also provides you with detailed information regarding which things need optimisation. Ultimately, GTmetrix is efficiently a one-stop-shop for all of your speed optimisation requirements.
GT Metrix provides the following information that many other tools will not offer, including:
- JavaScript redirect chains
- Exact Image Dimensions for Scaling
- Optimised images to download
3. Pingdom
Pingdom is one of the best-known website examining and speed testing tools presently available. You can sight content size by content type, content size by domain, the range of requests being made by the domain, and all file requests in an enormously helpful ‘waterfall’ format.
Pingdom presently permits you to check the speed of any website from 7 different locations (5 continents) intentionally placed around the globe. It has achieved popularity over the years as a result of the fact that it is super easy to utilise, particularly when compared to comparable speed test tools. For beginners, Pingdom can be the best way to set up.
Moreover, it also offers you a speed performance ranking, scored out of 100. This rating is wrecked down into twelve criteria, with every given an individual score. Once more, this is supportive for identifying the quick wins; you can target to make instantaneous, tangible upgrading to your website’s speed.
4. Dareboost
Dareboost is way above just a speed test tool. It is all-in-one service to administer your site’s performance: analysis, monitoring, and benchmarking.
Dareboost presents an accessible yet prevailing environment to fit the wants of any type of business. It is best for Search Engine Optimization managers, web developers and e-commerce managers. With its monitoring aspect, Dareboost consent to you gets advantage from its robust speed testing and analysis technology on a robotic source.
Most intentional web pages of your website will be tested daily or every hour, according to your requests. Your dashboard gives incredible graphs to excavate in your data, and you’ll also get weekly reports directly in your mailbox.
However, it also allows you to examine and check any web page you would like even your competitor’s website. However, it also gives you access to a remarkable range of comparison features:
- Mobile vs Desktop comparison
- Custom comparisons using advanced settings like Adblock, blacklist, HTTP headers and many more for unlimited use cases
- Evaluate your website with your competitor’s
- First view vs Repeated View Comparison
Monitoring features also draw closer with benchmark abilities. It allows you to observe your competitors and gives you the functionality to make as many groups as you require to study your data and to check whether your website is the fastest.
5. Webpagetest
WebPageTest tool has even more configuration selections as compared to other tools. It has more locations to select from, internet speed can be chosen, you can allow/disable a few browser options, and you can check particular devices.
It is an ideal tool which demonstrates a comprehensive waterfall report for every run (by default it makes three runs, but you can adjust that in the settings). Also, it displays an A to F grade for these following speed optimisation factors:
- compress transfer (gzip),
- Efficient use of Content Delivery Network(CDN)
- First-byte time (response time),
- keep-alive enabled,
- compact images,
- cache static content,
You can go into complete details, by checking every result tabs, where you will discover much valuable information.
The final thoughts
We can’t overemphasise the significance of keeping your website in top-notch shape. A slow site can show the way to a noteworthy fall in the number of visitors who stick around, which will pessimistically influence your bottom line.
So use this tutorial to assist you accurately test your website speed. Following these suggestions in this article will make your website lean and quick, which will advance your page loading time and hence user experience.
These enhancements might also bring in more capital and facilitate you save it some on the server costs. Thus it’s a win-win for everybody!