The loading speed of your website is important part of your visitors’ user experience; if you run an e-commerce website, performance issues could affect overall revenue by up to 9% – or, in dollar terms, $117 million a year.
So, how to check your website speed? Yes, you can open the URL in any browser and watch with your bare eyes. But, different browsers usually load websites differently and it’s better to have an objective view. This post is to get you serious about website speed and get started.
How Fast Is Your Website to Google?
As search engines like Google crawl your website, there’s a time spent downloading a page in milliseconds. The faster, the better. Many SEO believe it’s correlation factor to your rankings.
Time spent downloading a page (in milliseconds)
You can get this data from Google Webmaster Tools and you better do serious testing if the line in the chart goes north.
How to Check Website Speed in Details
If your website does load very slowly, you can use a test tool like WebPageTest.org offers to see detailed break down for problems. Google is also launching a service called “Page Speed” which automatically speeds up loading of your web pages.
Page Speed Service fetches content from your servers, rewrites your pages by applying web performance best practices and serves them to end users via Google’s servers across the globe. If you’re interested, you can sign up here. It’s not a free service, but, you can check out how much it can improve your website speed and evaluate whether the investment is worth it or not.
- Go to http://www.webpagetest.org/compare
- Enter the URL of your website, say
www.example.com.- Optional steps:
- Choose the test location and browser. The default is IE8 from US East (Virginia).
- Select More Configurations… for a broader selection of locations, browsers and network connection type. The default connection type is DSL.
- Click the Start Test button.
The test may take several minutes to complete, depending on the load on the test servers. The page will automatically refresh every 30 seconds and display the results when it is complete.
Sample Page Speed Test Results
Click on “view test” and you will see very detailed information about what affect your website loading speed and the “Page Speed” section also provides actionable suggestions. You can do this for free and pass the details to your IT staff to work out a solution.
If you care about customer experience, start with website visitors and speed up your website.