There are tons of free speed test tools that can help monitor your website’s speed and performance. Should you need more in-depth reports, most have a premium version that is worth considering.
You can check our tutorial on how to test your website speed performance using GTmetrix . For basic testing and reporting, its free version offers plenty of robust features. You can also buy the GTmetrix PRO to get additional report filtering and graphic features at a starting price of $14.95 per month Need a second opinion?
Use my FREE tool to check your site SEO!
SOME IMPORTANT FACTS TO CONSIDER
- Decreases website traffic since people don’t like waiting, a slow loading site will decrease your overall traffic.
- Slow sites kill conversions In fact, 47% of consumers expect websites to load in two seconds or less.
- If your site takes more than three seconds to load, you lose almost half of your visitors before they even arrive on your site.
- According to Kissmetrics , 47% of consumers expect a webpage to load in 2 seconds or less and 40% of people will abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load.
- Average eCommerce website conversions hover around 1-3% But that number can rise as high as 5 percent for some sites, like NatoMounts which sees an average conversion rate around five percent, with roughly 85% of those conversions on mobile.
Some tips you can use to improve your site Speed score and also get some SEO improvement are :
- Minimize HTTP requests According to Yahoo, 80% of a Web page’s load time is spent downloading the different parts of the page, like images, stylesheets, and scripts.
- Your homepage should lead with high-quality images to capture attention, but they can drag down your site speed. If you aren’t displaying them in full size then you should scale them appropriately to reduce your page load times. For example, an image that is 1000 x 1000 pixels but is only displayed at 100 x 100 pixels needs to load 10x more than necessary, which impacts load times.
- Simplifying your website’s design can increase your site speed. One reason for this is because it reduces the number of HTTP requests your website needs to make to load. An HTTP request is made for all the different elements that make up your website, including JavaScript, CSS and image files. As you reduce the number of elements on your website, the number of requests go down, impacting load times.
- Once your website is setup for caching, visitors will store the elements of your website on their hard drive in a cache or temporary storage. The next time they visit your site, their browser can load the page without needing to send all those HTTP requests to the server.
