Website speed has become increasingly important over the years. Slower websites will affect user experience which will in turn affect sales/conversions. It will also affect your rankings in search engines – Google has stated this, and rightfully so.
Improving the time it takes to load your site seems like a search engine optimization no-brainer and a few easy modifications can prove to be very beneficial. By running some speed tests on your site you will discover areas that need to be improved. There are many analysis tools available for testing your sites’ load speed, here are my top 5.
1. Google PageSpeed Insights
Google’s own PageSpeed Insights will fetch your URL twice, once with a desktop user-agent and once with a mobile user-agent. It will automatically generate suggestions on how to make your page faster on each mobile and desktop devices.
You will find mostly the same results with other website analysis tools, but this one is Google’s own and should make you move faster in regards to making those page speed optimization.
2. Pingdom Tools
Analyze the load speed of your websites with Pingdom’s Website Speed Test and view data such as file sizes, load times, and other details about every single element on your page such as HTML, JavaScript and CSS files and images.
Tests are saved for later review to track your optimization efforts.
3. GT Metrix
Similar to Google’s Page Speed Insights, GT Metrix will give you a long list of recommendations sorted by priority. A neat waterfall graph will display the loading behaviour of your site. It also provides a YSlow grade. This is based on Yahoo!’s rules for high performance web sites.
4. Google Analytics
Google’s Site Speed report in GA will show you how fast a particular browser parses your page and makes it available for user interaction. You can then apply different dimensions (such as county & browser) to view your data from a variety of perspectives.
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