Page load speed is always an important factor when building your website. The faster the page load speed, the better the search engine optimisation (SEO), and with that comes the ability to drive more visits, and subsequently, conversions.
With that improved traffic, your site will undoubtedly lead to more sales. All that with just an improved page load speed.
What about the inverse? What happens if you have a slow page load speed? Unfortunately, a slower page means poorer SEO performance, which in turn leads to lesser visits and conversions.
Fun fact: Once you get above 3 seconds, many visitors leave before the page loads, even more will bounce, and your conversion rate dips. That’s… not ideal.
As quoted by SEO expert Neil Patel:
The faster your site loads, the lower the bounce rate. If your site is fast, you have a better chance of ranking on Google over slow sites that drive high bounce rates.
So how do you go about improving your page speed?
Here is our list of the top 5 free page speed tools, along with instructions on how to use them, to give you a better understanding of real-world performance and search engine optimisation opportunities.
Let’s dive in.
1. Google PageSpeed Insights
Google PageSpeed Insights is a technical optimisation tool that provides diagnostic information directly from Google by analysing a webpage’s content.
This nifty tool helps to evaluate the page via a number of factors, namely landing page redirects, compression, server response time, browser caching, resources, images, CSS delivery, visible content, and render-blocking JavaScript.
By looking through these factors, PageSpeed Insights then computes a score from 0 to 100 that estimates its performance headroom. Anything above an 85 means that your website is performing well.
There are two main areas which PageSpeed measures to boost your site’s performance:
• Time to full page load: This shows the elapsed time from the moment a user requests a new page to the moment the page is fully rendered by the browser.
• Time to above-the-fold load: This is the elapsed time from the moment a user requests a new page to the moment the above-the-fold content is rendered by the browser.
Simply put, this tool helps you speed up your page load speed by telling you the best technical optimisations you can make to your webpage, to get that added boost to get your site on the coveted Google Page #1.
2. KeyCDN Website Speed Test
KeyCDN is a fast and lightweight website speed test tool which can get you detailed insights on how your website performs. It offers 14 different locations to choose from around the world, with the option of making your test results private or public.
Some of the stats KeyCDN provides can be very useful to know, like how many HTTP requests were made, the full size of the page requested, and most importantly, the load time. One big draw to KeyCDN is the fact that it is one of the few tools besides PageSpeed that works great on mobile devices.
3. Pingdom
Another great tool is Pingdom. This comprehensive tool tests the speed at which your website is delivered.
It is really easy to use as well! Simply enter your URL and the location you want to test from, choose the location that is closest to your business (and where your site is hosted), and voila, you get a great visual chart of your site’s performance grade, loading time, comparison report between sites, as well as the physical file size.
Note that there are only 4 main locations you can choose from for Pingdom, namely:
• Dallas, Texas, USA,
• Melbourne, Australia
• San Jose, California, USA
• Stockholm, Sweden
4. Google Mobile Test
According to information from Think With Google, 70 percent of mobile visits are still on a 3G data connection and expected to stay there until 2020. What does this supposed to mean?
Although your website can be perfectly optimised for a great desktop viewing experience; However, it does not necessarily equate to a fast page load speed on mobile. This is where the Google Mobile Test comes in.
The Google Mobile Tool provides you with a summary of your site’s performance on 3G, giving you a comparison with other sites in your industry, along with some optimisation suggestions. The tool also provides a detailed report which gives advice on how to speed up your site’s page load speed.
5. Varvy PageSpeed Optimisation
Last but not least, we have the Varvy Pagespeed Optimisation tool, created and maintained by Patrick Sexton. What Varvy provides is a report that is broken up into 5 different sections, including a resource diagram, CSS delivery, JavaScript usage, page speed issues found, and services used. A great thing about this tool is that it uses more of a graphical representation to inform you of what could be better optimised on your website.
There is even documentation on how to further optimise your site with tutorials on critical render path, leveraging browser caching, defer loading JavaScript, and much more. It is definitely worth checking out!
In summary, it is a lot easier to optimise your website’s page load speed with these 5 tools. However, page load speed is just one of the factor to measure SEO performance as there is a myriad of other factors to consider about and.
