Website Speed Test: How to Perform It and 4 Best Tools
If you want to build a conversion rate and a website that is SEO, search engine optimized, then Website Speed is important.
If your website is not fast enough, then people will bounce faster. This is a guide on the importance of a website speed test, how to run it, and the 4 best tools you can use.
1.
Website Speed Test
When your website does not load, the bounce rate from your website increases. Thus, your conversions decrease.
Speeding your website, however, is not an easy job.
The problem could be anything, from coding to not-so-good content to images or large page elements.
If you do not fix these issues, you will not rank on the search engines.
Moreover, the faster your website is, the lower the bounce rate will be. Thus, if you want to rank on Google, you must have a website that loads fast.
As an advantage, you will rank higher over slow websites that drive high bounce rates.
Why Page Speed Matters?
If you want your website to rank on Google’s search engine results, then page speed is an important factor.
Moreover, if your website is not on the top 10 organic pages, you will not rank on the first page.
Thus, you will have to focus on page speed for running a successful brand and website that converts.
According to a study by Backlinko, page speed and ranking are not co-relate.
However, the average time to load a website on the first page is 1.65 seconds which is relatively fast.
While according to Google, page speed does not matter. There was a complete update about it as well.
This connection is also lacked up by Google’s New PageSpeed Industry benchmarks.
They also found that as the page load increases, the chances of someone bouncing back from your site increases as follows:
This means, that if your page takes more than 10 seconds to load, then the bounce rate increases by more than 120%.
However, according to Backlinko, an average website takes 10.3 seconds to load fully and 27.3 seconds to load on mobile.
This study included more than 5 million websites, which means that we all are lacking behind when it comes to a fast-performing website.
According to another site Portent, page speed can increase conversion rates dramatically.
Thus, if your website loads in less than or in under 2 seconds, then it can increase traffic and revenue.
So what exactly causes your website to load slowly?
One of the most common causes is bulky images and poorly designed coding for your page.
So if your images are not optimized, you can have pages that take up multiple megabytes of space.
Page size and weight are measured by page weight bytes, and Google’s data shows that your page size or weight should be under 5OOk.
Learn more about Quick SEO Fixes to boot your Google Ranking
Why Website Speed Matters?
If you are wondering as to why website speed matters, then you should understand that it makes a big difference.
It affects the uses experience as well as search rankings and sales and conversion rates.
The following are the reasons, why your website speed matters:
1: When our website loads last, then you make a strong impression on your user and is a win for the user-friendly experience.
If your page loads faster, then your users and happy, while if it loads slow, then most users think of your website as unsafe, insecure, or not trustworthy.
2: With increasing workloads and competition, we need fast answers.
We want answers fast whether using a laptop, tablet, or a mobile phone.
When it comes to using authority pages like Google or Facebook, then people are willing to be patient, however, for small businesses and startups, they won’t wait.
3: If you want to set apart your website, then a good user experience and UX design are important.
Giving your users what they are looking for and giving them fast, are 2 important factors to get a positive user experience.
This is the reason, why website speed is important when it comes to user experience.
4: According to the above studies, if your website takes more than 2 seconds to load, the users will bounce back.
Thus, slow website loading speed means that your sales are decreasing.
Thus, low conversion rates.
2.
How to Run Website Speed Test?
Running a website test is not gonna tell you exactly how your website is performing.
There are times, when the traffic on the internet is too high that may affect your website, other times, everything is clear and you are able to run the tests easily.
There are a number of factors that can affect the quality and accuracy of the tests. Moreover, it is important to run these tests thoroughly before analyzing the data.
The following is the procedure you can run a website test to get accurate results.
1: Run Multiple Tests
There are a number of factors that can affect your website speed test.
Although, many website speed test tools run over clouds at faster internet speeds, however, each test can show a slightly different result.
One of the most noticeable differences is the time it takes to download a complete web page.
Moreover, many people recommend running at least 3 tests for more accurate results.
Thus, you can take out an average result and use it to decide where your website or page needs improvement or not.
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2: Using Different Geographic Locations
If your target audience is from Asia, then running a website speed test using servers in Africa will not be good for you.
The results will show a different user experience than what your target users are feeling while they visit your page.
You can use Google Analytics to see where your users are coming from and use this info to select the geographic region to run your tests.
For instance, if your users are coming from Asia, then choosing a server in India or Abu Dabi will give your closest results.
However, if your users are from all around the world, then you can run a number of tests with different regions.
3: Website Cache
Before running the tests, turn on your website cache.
This allows you to test website or page caching and how effectively you can increase its performance.
However, a problem is that catching solutions only store cache when a user requests the page which means that it can take time to build and may expire when to run website speed tests.
For instance, you can use WP Rocket that lets you set up your WordPress cache with a few clicks and without learning any technical stuff.
Performance of Website Firewall
WordPress caching plugins can do a lot for you however, they have limitations.
For instance, it cannot block DDOS attacks and brute force attempts. Moreover, it does nothing against spambots.
For this, you can use different WordPress firewall plugins that improve your server performance by blocking malicious requests.
Usually, your website files are served from the same server, however, you can improve this by adding CDN service to your website.
This allows you to serve static website files such as images, stylesheets, and scripts through a network of servers.
Thus, it helps to reduce the server load on your website, making it load faster and improves user experience,
Understanding the Results
The most important factor you should understand is the time your page takes to load.
This affects your user the most. Meaning that if your website takes longer to load, then users will bounce back and will have a bad impression of your website.
Thus, if your website is taking longer than 2 seconds to load, then you need to identify factors that are causing problems.
Usually, images, stylesheets, scripts loading, video embeds can make your webpage load slowly.
Moreover, pay attention to the time the server takes to load your page and the time to deliver the first byte.
Make sure that the browser compression or Gzip compression is working.
This reduces the file size between your server and the user’s browser.
If your page or website has a lot of images, then consider deferred loading techniques or lazy loading.
This allows your content to load fast when users scroll down.
Another important parameter to test is TTFB, time to the first byte.
If your web server is showing slow time continuously, then you may need to talk to the Webhosting company.
Now let’s move to the 4 best tools you can use to run Website Speed Tests.
3.
4 Best Tools
The internet is full of free and paid websites speed test tools and performance monitoring tools.
However, each of them has a unique set of features that makes them different from one another.
The following are the 4 best tools you can use to test your website speed.
You will have to run multiple tests on multiple tools thoroughly.
Achieving a perfect score on these tools is often difficult, thus use them to improve your website performance.
Thus, your main goal should be to improve the loading speed of your website so that your users can have a faster and consistent experience.
The following are the best tools for website speed tests.
1: IsItWP Website Speed Test Tool
IsItWP‘s website speed test tool is one of the most user-friendly website speed testing tools.
It allows you to check your website performance quickly, run different and multiple tests, and drills down results to find out what factors are slowing down the speed of your website.
Moreover, it also gives you improvement suggestions which you can easily use to optimize your website.
Therefore, when you click on each category to see the steps you can take to troubleshoot performance issues.
This website also offers server uptime monitoring and other useful tools as well.
2: Google PageSpeed Insight
Google PageSpeed Insight is a website monitoring tool by Google.
It gives you website performance reports not only for laptop or PC users but also for mobile or smartphone users.
You can easily switch between these reports and find issues that are common among both reports.
Moreover, Google recommends fixing the mobile view of your website.
It also gives you recommendations in detail about each and every issue your website or page is facing, which is helpful even for developers.
However, the tool is a little difficult for beginners and non-developer users.
3: GTmetrix
GTmetrixis another powerful website speed testing tool and allows you to test your website.
It provides popular tools like page speed and Yslow.
Moreover, you can change the geographic regions and location as well as browser by creating an account.
It also shows reports in detail along with a brief summary of the results of your speed tests.
You can also switch between the 2 tools and view recommendations by GTmetrix.
Click on each recommendation to view more details about specific issues.
4: Pingdom
One of the most popular website performance testing tools is Pingdom.
It is very user-friendly, easy to use, and allows you to select different geographical locations to run a test which is really helpful.
The results of Pingdom are easy to understand which also provides you a detailed report.
Moreover, you can get performance improvement suggestions at the top as well as individual resources as they load.
Final Thoughts
If you want to optimize your SEO, then webpage speed and its loading time are crucial for your ranking in search engines.
It not only means better conversion rates but also improves your ranking in search engines and user-friendly experience which is very important for your website and sales.
We hope that this article helped you to learn a website speed test and the tools to run your tests.