How important are your website’s loading times? Well, here’s a statistic from Google that sheds light on the subject: “The probability of bounce increases 32% as page load time goes from 1 second to 3 seconds.”
In other words, even just a two-second delay in your website homepage’s load time could, at least online, lose you about a third of your company’s potential customers.
Fortunately, listed below are several feature-rich online tools with which you would be able to ascertain how to make your website appreciably zippier.
Google PageSpeed Insights
This free tool is straightforward to use; just click through to the Google PageSpeed Insights page, enter a webpage URL into the text field at the top of the page, hit the adjacent blue button labelled ‘Analyze’, and away you go.
The tool can highlight superfluous elements of your site that are dragging down its load times and so ought to be stripped out. For example, you might be advised to reduce redundant JavaScript or serve images in newer, less data-intensive formats.
SolarWinds Pingdom
Whisper it: Pingdom is actually a paid tool. However, you could find it more than worth the financial outlay — as, with its access to not only simulated lab data but also real-time field data, it enables you to assess how your website’s load times would fare in a wide range of circumstances.
Your online visitors could differ in whether they load the site, say, on a desktop or mobile device and on a slow or fast network. However, you can account for all of those possibilities with SolarWinds Pingdom.
Google Search Console
You might already be familiar with how useful Google Search Console can be for helping you with measuring how well-primed your website is for success in Google search rankings.
Nonetheless, it can remain too easy to overlook Search Console’s ‘Speed report’ feature, which would let you see how fast individual pages are across a range of browsers and devices. Here is an in-depth introduction to how the Speed report works in Google Search Console.
New Relic
Making changes to the website in attempts to make it faster can feel uncomfortably like tinkering with your computer’s registry settings: if something goes wrong, it can go very wrong. This all leaves the question: how are you supposed to know exactly where to tread?
You could leave the subscription-based New Relic tool to do that treading on your behalf — including debugging code and cleaning up plugins.
GTmetrix
GTmetrix works much like PageSpeed Insights, in the sense that it flags up problem areas needlessly slowing down your website. Furthermore, you can try GTmetrix for free, though you will need to sign up to a subscription plan to unlock enhanced functionality.
This includes seeing how quick your site would be in different countries as well as on different browsers.
Ultimately, though, prevention is better than cure — and if your business currently lacks its own website, we at Webahead Internet can design you a website in a manner that allows for nicely optimised loading times.
