How to tell how quickly your website loads

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It has never been more important to have a website that loads quickly. Because of the huge rise in mobile browsers, having a speedy website is now mandatory if you want to give your customers the best user experience possible. It’s so important that Google is even using it as a ranking factor, demoting websites that don’t load quickly.

Having a faster website can have a huge impact on your business. Not only can it help you to rank better in Google, it can also improve the way in which your customers interact with your website. Having a faster loading website can increase the time they spend on your site and increase the rate at which browsers convert. In short, improving your website’s speed can have a big impact on your bottom line.

 

How to test your website with online tools

No one knows how fast their website loads until they test it. The good news is that there are several online tools that business owners can use to check the speed of their website. Some will even provide recommendations on how to make your pages load quicker.

Let’s take a look at them.

 

Google PageSpeed Insights

Given how much importance Google is placing on site speed, it’s no surprise that it has its own tool for measuring how quickly pages load. Google Page Speed Insights will give your website r ranking out of 100 for both mobile and desktop versions. It will also provide a list of recommended improvements that you can make.

There’s a good chance that one of these will be better-optimized images. Images can play a big role in how quickly your website loads and having smaller images is essential. Luckily, Google will even provide you with optimized versions of all your images automatically.

 

Pingdom

Google isn’t the only speed testing tool on the web. In fact, it’s not even the best. That award goes to Pingdom, a very comprehensive site speed tester that provides loads more information that PageSpeed Insights. On the Pingdom site you are able to test how quickly your pages load at various places around the world, including Sweden and Australia. This is great for global websites who need their pages to load quickly outside of the U.S. Pingdom also gives users a complete breakdown of how long it took to load every single element. This lets you quickly see which file took the longest to load so that you can make the necessary changes.  

 

Web Page Test

The final tool you should consider is Web Page Test. This tool will let you test the speed of your website in various browsers. Some are faster than others and they all handle your website differently. That’s why it’s important to make sure that your website is loading quickly in every browser.

If you’re serious about making your website faster, you should be using all of these tools to do the job. Doing so will give you a comprehensive view of how long your website takes to load and hat you can do to improve it.