Peoples do not like to wait and specially when it comes to be in queue for shopping, parking, traffic, etc… and we can do whatever required to avoid waiting. As a website visitors we also do not like to visit any site where we have to wait and wait until all the content loaded.
Websites loading content faster can have good number of user engagement, higher raking in search engine results, lower bounce rates and higher conversion rates. In short if you site is not loading content faster then you can loose your potential business on-line. On-line users often do not hesitate to share bad experience with any site and that can impact on the business or sales as well.
Page load time
It is the lapsed time between the moment a website visitor type URL or requests a new page and when that page is fully loaded/rendered by the browser. Page load time is related to bounce rates and conversion rates. The lower page load time decrease the bounce rate and increase the conversion rate. Lower page loading time means preserving visitors for some time on your site.
Main benefits of faster loading websites
- Higher sales and therefore greater revenue
- Higher conversion rates from potential business to customers
- Customer retention
- Customer satisfaction
- Keep website visitors interested in visiting your site
- And many more
I would like to share some tools which I often use to test the page load speed.
1. GTmetrix
GTmetrix can help you develop a faster, more efficient, and all-around improved website experience for your users. It is a free tool that grades your website speed. GTmetrix not only provides page speed analysis, but it will also analyze different ways to improve speed and performance of given website. You’ll even see your website’s YSlow grade.
GTmetrix offers number of tools to monitor page speed including a video playback and variety of reporting options. It allows to export the entire test history. They are providing both free and paid account options.
2. WebPagetest
WebPagetest is a free on-line tool that displays the load time of your web page as well as different performance grades.
WebPageTest also providing facilities where users can specify location and select browsers for testing their website. If you are having a website which targets global market and different geographical regions then this is very important tool for you and it can help because different geographical region users have different favorite browsers.
WebPageTest will provide overall grade as well as checklist with suggested changes to improve performance when you run a test.
WebPageTest Website Performance Analyzing Tool
3. YSlow
It is a free and very good plugin offering features to measure website performance on your browser. It can be also very helpful analyzing speed while development. It will not show actual loading time or website performance but it will provide around 20 different grades to measure website or web page performance.
YSlow also provides suggestions on how to improve web page or website performance. When analyzing a web page performance YSlow deducts points for each infraction of a rule and then applies a grade to each rule.
YSlow Website Performance Analyzing Tool
4. Google PageSpeed
Google PageSpeed is another free and good tool to measure website performance.
PageSpeed provides suggestions to make your website faster by analyzing content of the site. It will not show the load time of any page. PageSpeed suggestions are based on general principles of website performance including client and server round-trip time, data upload size, data download size, caching, etc…
5. Pingdom
Pingdom is not a free tool and charging:
– $45.95 for monthly plans
– $505.45 for yearly plans
Pingdom is also good website performance testing tool that provides very useful information about website speed. It does not only provide website performance grades but it also provide very useful information in terms of time required for each element of the page to load. It also provides information on overall health of your site by getting into HTTP server response codes, it helps in providing more in depth data for examining website performance.
With Pingdom you can analyze website performance as well as be the first to know when your website is down.
Pingdom Website Performance Analyzing Tool
This is not the complete list of tools and there are many more exists out there. I’ve listed tools which I used in past, if you have any suggestions or any other known website performance measurement tool then please drop a comment and I will add it to the list above.
