Running an online business is not easy today as there are many complications that businesses have to deal with. It is not easy for businesses to rank their website on the top of Google’s first page as various factors play an important role. Among these, the website’s speed is considered the most crucial factor.
Related: 10+ Best Shopify Speed Optimization App To Look For In 2022
Google considers the load speed of a website as the most vital factor for ranking a website. Generally, a slow-loading website is considered the main reason for a website not being able to rank well on the SERPs. When we talk about the impact of a slow website on website visitors, it can result in low conversion rates with increasing bounce rates. Hence a slow-loading website can lead to reduced revenue and affect your overall business.
So what can be done to be able to deal with this issue?
The answer is simple; testing the speed of your website!
You need to test the speed of your website as it can help you to figure out whether your website needs improvement or not. The first step of knowing about any problem is knowing whether it exists for its cure!
Let us know what Page Speed is.
The loading time of a site refers to how long it takes to display properly in a viewer’s web browser. Usually, the ideal page speed is two seconds or under is considered to be an ideal page speed. Research by Marketing Dive in 2016 shows that 53% of people abandon mobile websites that take longer than three seconds to load.
So here we can see how important website speed is in the search rankings. Another thing to consider about the speed aspect is that a customer usually does not like it if a site takes forever to load especially when it comes to eCommerce Web Development. Hence it doesn’t matter how good your products are or attractive your site looks, but if it doesn’t load faster, there’s no point. So here we mentioned a list of tools you can use for your speed test.
Tools For Testing The Website Speed
While there are a lot of apps that help you with both paid and free tools that will help you to know the speed of your site, we have listed eight apps that will tell you how to test the speed of your site and suggest to you various changes that you need to make in your website.
Speed Testing Tool #1: Google PageSpeed Insights
Google PageSpeed Insights is one of the popular tools among web developers by Google that tells you about the website’s performance. With Google PageSpeed Insights, you can test your website speed on a scale from 0 to 100. A perfect score shown by the tool means your website is performing well. The tools provide information insights for different devices and versions like desktop and mobile devices, and you receive some actionable insights for improving your site’s performance and score. Lastly, PageSpeed Insights breaks down the time it takes for your website to finish loading each page of your site based on Google’s core web vitals. The Core web vitals are CLS, LCP, FID, etc. By analyzing your core web vitals, you can better understand what your page load looks like from a user perspective.
Pricing: Free
Speed Testing Tool #2: Pingdom
Pingdom is one of the best performance monitoring tools in the list that provides suggestions to improve your site speed and make your site faster. Like Google PageSpeed Insights, the tool provides data on your site’s performance. The tool allows you to test the data based on geographical locations. Pingdom provides you with performance grades, speed metrics like page load time, and several improvements for your website. Based on the detailed analysis provided by the tool, it provides suggestions for ways to improve the page speed.
Pricing: Starts at $10/Month(Free Trial)
Speed Testing Tool #3: GTMetrix
GTMetrix is also one of the most performance monitoring tools that break down results in several ways. It combines Google PageSpeed Insights and YSlow performance and recommendations to provide a comprehensive analysis on improving website speed. The tool is considered to be one of the best alternatives for Pingdom. The tool provides you with various suggestions, and by clicking on them, GT Metrix provides you with a summary of the results, detailed reports, and options based on your website speed. The tool is said to provide a waterfall report. The waterfall report displays URLs, request and response headers (response headers contain a lot of helpful information about specific checks), and the connection details for each element. You can also easily identify problem areas and bottlenecks using the tool’s waterfall chart, which displays a list of your requests by creating a free account.
Pricing: Free
Speed Testing Tool #4: MonsterInsights
MonsterInsights is an analytics WordPress plugin that helps you measure your website’s loading speed. With MonsterInsights, you can improve your website’s performance and user experience by viewing an overall score and other metrics. You can see the report from your WordPress dashboard without leaving your website. A great feature of MonsterInsights is that it shows you what you should aim for based on each metric. Moreover, you’ll get suggestions for improving each metric and your site’s performance. Using the plugin’s Site Speed report, you can measure the mobile website speed and desktop.
Pricing: $99.50/Year
Speed Testing Tool #5: IsitWP
Isitwp is a free website speed test tool that provides website speed test insights to users. It allows you to check your website’s performance quickly, run over multiple tests, and dig deep down into your site to find out the reasons for slowing down your site. Additionally, you will receive neatly organized improvement suggestions. The steps you can take to troubleshoot performance issues can be found by clicking on each category. Also included are tools that will help site owners monitor their web server uptime.
Pricing: Free
Speed Testing Tool #6: DareBoost
The DareBoost is a website speed test tool, and site performance monitoring services make it easier for you to maintain and improve page performance. Although this tool is just like other free tools on the list, it provides a free website performance assessment with a few extra features. You can quickly identify weak spots on your site by analyzing more than different data types with this tool. In addition to providing accessible, understandable reports, the design contains detailed information about best practices for optimizing your site to reduce load times. While DareBoost offers many of the same features we’ve seen in other tools on this list, its detailed best practice guidance and interactive video playback set it apart from the competition.
Pricing: Free
Speed Testing Tool #7: New Relic
New Relic is a helpful tool that provides information about website performance and speed checks. This tool shows you response times for your plugins and themes and speed tests for mobile. A website speed drop can also be detected automatically through New Relic, making it easy to investigate further and resolve the problem as soon as possible. This paid tool is best suited for experienced owners of larger websites who need up-to-date reports about when their sites are suffering from performance issues. This can assure you with an all-time fast loading website.
Pricing: Free
Speed Testing Tool #8: Uptrends
Using Uptrends can provide you with useful information, including your Google PageSpeed score, load time, page size, vital web information, and requests, as well as suggestions that can help you get a fast-loading site that uses the latest browser versions. As part of the performance suggestions, it prioritizes each category regarding how it affects the total load time. Moreover, you can visualize the loading of the assets on your page in various ways. It is not recommended for beginners, however, since its interface lacks tooltips and clear instructions that clarify the meaning of these metrics.
Pricing: Starts at $18/Month(Free Trial)
How To Test The Speed Of A Website?
It is not guaranteed that when you run a website speed test, it will provide you with accurate information about your website. There are various things that you have to keep in mind when you’re running the test, as the quality and accuracy of your results are also affected by several other factors. You thoroughly analyze the data before you start running these tests. To get more accurate results from a website speed test, let’s see how to do it correctly.
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Conduct a test for multiple factors
Your test can be affected by multiple factors. While most website speed test tools run over the cloud at the fastest internet speeds, each test will show you slightly different results. Regarding download times, the biggest difference is how long it takes to complete the process. We recommend running at least three tests to obtain a more accurate picture. Using an average result, you can determine whether or not you need to improve your website.
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Test For Multiple Locations
You may have visitors from different locations in various places of the world, so it becomes necessary that you run multiple tests to check how your site performs in different geographical locations. To know where your visitors are coming from, you can use Google Analytics which is one tool that will provide you with the required information about the regions; later, you can choose different regions to test your website and also get the speed test results as per different locations. When you test your website, it is important to ensure that the selected regions are appropriate for your business or that the data will not be meaningful information.
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Enabling The CDN Service
The Content Delivery Network (CDN) distributes static website files, such as images and scripts, across a worldwide network of servers. Thus, the page load time is reduced, the site’s load time is increased, and the loading process is improved. You will see significant improvements in your page load speed test result when you enable the CDN service.
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Ensuring The Website Caching Is Turned On
Before you’re running tests, you have to ensure that the website caching is turned on as it allows you to test it and lets you know how effective it is to improve performance. Remember that caching solutions only store data when a user requests a page, so you must consider that. When you run the tests, the cache may have expired by the time it’s built. In this case, you can consider using the WP Rocket caching plugin by WordPress, which enables you to set up your site cache and proactively update it so that your website will perform significantly better.
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Know About The Website Test Results
When you’re using tools to run website speed tests, you are provided with various suggestions regarding the website’s improvement, and implementing them can help you improve the website speed significantly. Here is an example of Pingdom’s website speed test results, which measured a website’s speed. The tool has also suggested improving the website speed and showing the site’s speed. Therefore, you must be aware of these technical aspects to improve your website’s page speed.
Final Words On The Article
So here we listed all the tools that can help you know about your current speed and also provide with arrears of improvement in order to improve the website speed and help you do better on the SERPs. If you are having a Shopify website and looking for a comprehensive guide, we have prepared one which you can refer to work on the speed optimization for your Shopify website. Also if you need assistance regarding improving the speed of your website you can reach us at Huptech Web.
Also Read: https://www.huptechweb.com/shopify-lazyload-images-guide/
Also Read: https://www.huptechweb.com/ecommerce-website-development-guide/
