The speed by which a page loads is very important in SEO. It doesn’t matter how beautiful your design, how well-written your content; you risk losing people that lose patience if the site doesn’t load as quickly as they’re expecting.
To do test the speed by which the homepage of your customer loads, we use: gtmetrix.com
Toggle the browser from Vancouver (the default) to Dallas. Obviously, we want to make sure our test is as close to the end user (domestic vs international).
We’re going to look at three things:
- Top right in Page Details – Fully Loaded Time
The goal is under 3 seconds on desktop, and ideally under 5 on mobile (which can be tested in GTMetrics by selecting “LTE Mobile” from the Connection Type setting before running the test). That said, there are a lot of variables and if you run this test 10 times you may get 10 different results. Don’t panic if you’re not consistently in this range. - Top right in Page Details – Total Page Size
Less than 1 MB is best, 2 is OK, 3+ is a potential issue. A few of your sites are going to be a little more than 3 MB (especially old framework or ones with large background images or videos). This is typically due to customers requesting specific work on their homepage that we did and still do recommend against for matters of page speed. Large page size has a significant impact on mobile speeds in particular, so compressing images is especially important. - Ctrl+F and look for – Avoid Bad Requests
These are usually poorly written scripts – i.e. email marketing software scripts, weather widgets – from other sites. For VRs – DEV is aware of the plugin problems for close.png, loading.gif, next.png and prev.png.
If you see any issues related to the above, take the related tasks offered to fix the problem and add them to Zoho and assign them to a member of the DEV team to fix. If the issue is #2 – Total Page Size – first look at the images used on the homepage and make sure that they have been properly resized and compressed. Most of the time, excess page size comes from unoptimized images.
Additional page speed testing tools include:
- https://tools.pingdom.com/ – has an easy-to-scan waterfall graph of page elements so you can quickly identify large images or other elements that are impacting performance
- https://gtmetrix.com – provides a lot of detailed information. Create a free account to use it and make sure to change the Test Server Region from Vancouver to somewhere in the US
- https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/ – Google’s official page speed test. Also useful, and if our customers ever look into testing their page speed, this is almost always the score they’ll be looking at, so getting it into the green is important if for nothing else than their perception.
- https://testmysite.thinkwithgoogle.com/ – this is a great resource because it’s another official Google test, but it specifically tests your page’s speed on a mobile network, which is where performance issues are most likely to have an impact. Recommend doing this immediately post-launch for new websites.
- https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/feature/mobile/ – Google’s Mobile page speed comparison tool, which tests 4G connection speeds, can compare against competitor websites, and includes a tool for calculating the potential revenue that could be gained by improving load times. Google Mobile Page Speed Comparison tool