If you want to analyze and measure your site speed, especially on mobile, this article provides you with the most important tools to help you check and improve your site speed. Site speed is an important factor in your website’s ranking on Google, and the faster it is, the better the user experience and the more traffic. Since 2018, mobile page loading speed has become one of the most influential factors in website rankings. Read the article to learn how to measure website speed using effective tools, and we at Code Time Digital Marketing are here to help you improve your visibility in Google and increase your results.
What is the meaning of Site Speed
Site speed is how long it takes for the entire page content to load and appear on the user’s screen, allowing them to interact with the content smoothly and easily, whether by browsing, clicking, or exploring products and services. The faster it loads, the higher the quality of the user experience, reflecting the site’s efficiency and attention to improving customer satisfaction.
Why is it important to increase site speed?
Measure website speed provides many benefits, including:
- Increase traffic
Website loading speed is one of the factors that Google relies on to rank websites in the search results. The faster a website is, the more likely it is to appear in the first results, which will naturally attract more visitors from search engines. This means that a slow website may lead to the loss of a large number of potential visitors, which negatively affects the performance of the website.
- Increase conversion rates and boost sales
The importance of website speed doesn’t just stop at attracting visitors, it extends to improving the conversion rate as well. Users prefer fast websites that make it easier for them to navigate and make purchasing decisions.
- Optimize the user experience
A slow website causes visitors to leave the site before the content is loaded, which increases the bounce rate and weakens the site’s performance. In contrast, a fast website ensures a smooth user experience, encouraging visitors to spend more time and engage with the content, thus improving overall performance indicators.
Tools of Measure website speed
Measure website speed is essential for optimizing its performance, which contributes to boosting its ranking in search engines (SEO). Testing website speed is one of the best ways to evaluate its performance, as speed testing tools help monitor performance and detect issues that cause slow website, allowing them to be easily addressed. There are many tools available to measure page speed, including:
- GTmetrix tool
A free tool that provides comprehensive site speed reports and helps identify issues and their causes. It relies on Google PageSpeed Insights and YSlow to provide recommendations for optimization.
- Google PageSpeed Insights
A tool from Google to Measure website speed on computers and mobile devices. It gives you a rating from 1 to 100, with 85 and above being a good indicator. It also offers suggestions to improve the user experience.
- Web PageTest
Allows you to test your site speed using real browsers like Google Chrome. It provides detailed data to help improve performance, such as content analysis and connection speed.
- Pingdom tool
One of the most popular tools for measure website speed, it gives a rating out of 100 based on 12 different factors, which helps to easily identify issues, especially for beginners.
- Google Test My Site
Measures site speed on mobile devices, compares it to your competitors, and then provides a report with recommendations for optimization.
- Web Page Analyzer
A free tool that helps analyze site speed and size, and provides recommendations to reduce page load time.
Using these tools will enable you to easily optimize your site speed, enhancing user experience and improving search engine rankings.
How to increase the speed of your website?
Improving site speed enhances user experience and raises its ranking in search engines (SEO). Before you get started, use the Google PageSpeed Insights tool to analyze your site’s performance and get improvement suggestions. Next, apply the following steps to easily increase your site speed:
- Normal speed tests
Measure website speed is an important part of regular maintenance, as its speed can be affected over time as a result of modifications, content addition, or some technical and design issues. Therefore, it is essential to perform speed tests regularly and make the necessary optimizations to ensure optimal performance.
By keeping your site fast, you’ll be able to improve the user experience and boost your search engine rankings. You can use tools like PageSpeed Insights to analyze performance and get accurate speed optimization recommendations.
- Choosing Fast Hosting
Choosing fast and reliable hosting is a key factor in increasing website speed, as the hosting company provides the servers on which all your website files are stored, and can be likened to renting space on the internet.
Many users tend to buy the cheapest hosting, but it is often shared and crowded, which affects performance.
- Content Optimization
After creating the content, it is preferable to follow these steps to enhance its loading speed and improve its organization, as organizing the content well contributes to improving the speed of the site:
- Divide long articles to make them easier to read and optimize loading.
- Remove unnecessary comments to lighten the content.
- Avoid large images and files on a single page to increase speed.
- Website File Compression
Compress site files with Gzip to minimize loading time, as it allows browsers to decompress quickly. This helps speed up the transfer of data over the internet compared to sending multiple small files separately.
- Use a CDN
A content delivery network (CDN) like Cloudflare helps speed up website loading and minimize bandwidth consumption by hosting files on multiple servers around the world. Data is downloaded from the server closest to the visitor, relieving pressure on the primary server and protecting the site from traffic congestion and DDoS attacks.
- Clean up your database
Over time, unnecessary data may accumulate in the website’s database, especially for WordPress users, affecting speed. Therefore, it is recommended to delete unused templates, files, plugins, and unnecessary JavaScript code. If you are unable to do so, you can seek help from the hosting support team to clean the database and optimize site performance.
- Use Image Compression
You must adjust the size and format of images to suit your needs before uploading them, and save them in compressed file formats such as JPG. You can use ShortPixel for this purpose, as the extension automatically optimizes your images to ensure they display at the highest quality on mobile devices.
- Enable Mobile Caching
Many caching plugins like WP Rocket and WP Fastest Cache have a mobile specific caching feature, which helps improve site loading speed on mobile devices.
Conclusion
In the end, your website should be fast enough to load within three seconds. If the site is slow, visitors may lose interest and move on to other sites. Therefore, it’s important to always optimize your site’s loading speed using tools to measure website speed, as the better the site speed, the better your chances of ranking in search results.
Frequently asked questions
What is a good site speed?
When you use the PageSpeed Insights tool to Measure website speed, you’ll see a percentage that reflects an estimate of how fast the page loads. A site speed is considered good if it’s between 50 and 100.
What are the ways to check site performance?
PageSpeed Insights, GTMetrix, WebPageTest, Pingdom, and many other tools are available that can be used to Measure website speed and improve its performance.