“You may have heard that everyone at Google is obsessed with the speed of loading the site,” write Amit Singhal and Matt Cutts in the official blog of Webmaster Central. “Improving the speed of downloading sites is important not only for website owners, but also for all Internet users.” Recall that the factor Site Speed was announced April 9, 2010.
And although this indicator is far from being of paramount importance in search rankings (besides, this mainly affects English-language queries), download speed is one of the key indicator for users of your resource.
Simply put, if your site drags like a turtle, you lose users. When you lose users, you lose traffic. Having lost traffic, you drop out of the clip. Domino effect. That is why it is so important to monitor the speed of the website, and even more importantly – to understand which levers should be pressed and how to determine the problem. Fortunately, the tools for this are more than enough.
There are both web applications and plug-ins for popular browsers, as well as modules that are part of larger tools like Google Analytics.
GTmetrix
“Everyone deserves fast surfing,” says GTmetrix on the start page. The tool operates with data from two popular services from Google and Yahoo! – PageSpeed Insights and YSlow, respectively. You get not only the download speed indicators, but also a report on the work of the entire site and practical recommendations on how to optimize it.
Pingdom
Introducing as a simple monitoring of work and performance, Pingdom immediately impresses with a comely and concise interface. This authoritative service allows you to change the location of the server with which your site is evaluated, determine whether your data will be available to the general public, and also makes suggestions on how to optimize web site loading speed.
WebPagetest
This is an open-source project, originally developed by the Google team as part of the Make the Web faster campaign. The feature of this service is the ability to test download speeds in different browsers and through different servers. In the advanced settings, you can also select the average speed of the Internet connection, which will help assess the performance of your site in different conditions.
Neustar
“Proven information is the best solution,” declares at Neustar, providing a whole bunch of services: from digital marketing and selling domain names to cyber security services. Neustar allows you to test for free the download speed of a site from several locations at the same time (which saves you time), however, it does not give recommendations on how to accelerate the resource.
Load impact
Load Impact assures that they are on-demand leaders in testing the speed and performance of your site. They approach the test really thoroughly (at least because it lasts significantly longer than the others). At the output, you get a map showing the distance between the server that your website is running on and their own server used for testing, as well as a whole bunch of other metrics that take into account the “responsiveness” of different types of your content.
Page Speed Tool by Internet Marketing Ninjas
The service from the Internet Marketing resource Ninjas is one of the most limited offers. Determining the download speed for different connection types (and for different URLs), Page Speed Tool doesn’t really know anything else, but instantly gives a comprehensive idea of how your site works for users with both fast and extremely slow connections.
Uptime is more important
There are still many opportunities to check the resource loading speed, as well as to get basic or more detailed recommendations for its acceleration. If you look closely at the screenshots above, you will notice a very impressive variation of indicators. This is influenced by many factors: load and location of servers, algorithms used by service providers, etc. That is why you should combine the indicators of different testers and be aware of why the loading speed of the start page in the same, it would seem, conditions, almost doubled. And only having received directives and determining what exactly needs to be improved, dive into the code.
There is a great Japanese proverb: “Fast is slow, but without interruption.” Speed is important, but more important is the continued availability and relevance of your website.