Website speed is the killer line while talking about how much success will have your website.
In this blog-post I just want to talk about some facts and numbers that will give better image of reality, also will share some key tips of improving the speed of website.
Lower page load time means higher conversion rate
It’s a known truth that you only have 3 seconds to convince your website’s visitors to get engaged. And here one of the main factors is website speed. Almost half of the website visitors expect the website to open in less than 2 seconds. Even 1 second delay can lower conversion with 7%.
Website speed is included in Google search ranking algorithms
Since 2010, Google has included website speed signal in it’s search queries. If you have great content and good structured website but fail in rankings, check the speed too. Below I’ll share the best tools for checking your website’s speed.
Recommended tools for testing your website speed
Even if you think that your website works perfectly, take just a few minutes to analyze it with the tools below: maybe there are still some points to improve.
Pingdom Website Speed Test
Pingdom is one of the great online tools for testing your website’s speed. It examines all parts of a web page (HTML, JavaScript and CSS files, images, etc.), gives performance overview and some great tips for improvements based on the best practices. Another great thing is that it keeps test history for you to compare your new and old results. Tests are being done with real browsers and match the end user experience.
Google PageSpeed Insights
I think all of you know about this tool, just couldn’t help myself but to share it in this list (I am a big fan of Google products). It gives awesome insights about website’s desktop and mobile performances. Also suggests cures for the issues that need improvement. Though those solutions are not always realistic to achieve.
GTmetrix
GTmetrix is another great tool for analyzing website performance, it also provides actionable recommendations to fix these issues. My most loved feature of this tool is that you can easily set alerts with numerous conditions based on PageSpeed/YSlow scores, Page load time, Total Page size, etc. The GTMetrix REST API also allows developers to build their own testing and performance tools based on GTMetrix.
MX LOOKUP
Mx LOOKUP tool is best for testing your domain/host for blacklisting, DNS issues, response time, etc.You should simply enter your domain name and see analysis.
There are a lot of other speed test tools, i’d just advise you to test on some tools and compare results. If you know any other great tools, please share with us in comments.
Website Speed Optimization
Choosing trustworthy web hosting
You may have to invest more time and money for getting high quality web hosting, especially if you are anticipating to have high traffic, like commercial websites. Take into account that the provider is not overselling in the shared hosting environment.Web hosting plays key performance in the website speed, so always take extra efforts for finding a good one.
Proper image Optimization
There is no argue that for attracting visitor attention you need to have nice high quality photos at your website but you should already bare in mind that large photos mean larger load time. So how to get the best of loading time and quality images. There are handful of image optimising tools that will come to help you with this: the logic is that they reduce the file size but don’t harm the quality significantly. Some of these kind of tools are ImageOptim, JPEGmini, Smush.it, etc.
Caching
This method is often overlooked by developers but in reality it can boost website speed significantly. There are different caching options like server related and web applications, but you should test to see which works better for your website. For example for WordPress W3 Total Cache and WP Super Cache are the most popular caching plugins but you can explore more to find the right one for you.
Other factors to take into account
Plugins and widgets you use: always keep these tools minimum leaving only essential ones, while using plugins with complex functions make sure that they are operating off-server.
Advertising links and affiliates: through affiliate code means just a few lines of scripts but in reality they take valuable space in your hosting memory.
Speed boosting extensions: many website developers are suggesting great tools to boost your website speed. The principles behind this are pretty simple: they just reduce the number of HTTP requests, or individual bits and pieces a user has to download to properly load the page, can decrease page load times significantly.
Follow our blog and in our next updates, we’ll talk about speed boosting extensions for different CMS platforms.
