Page Speed

Page speed or loading speed means how long it takes for a webpage to load all its content. This can include text, images, videos and applications. If you look at the source code of a webpage you will often see that a multitude of different files and code are loaded to display what you see on the frontend. To optimize page speed the number of files should be reduced and code has to be minified. Another significant factor for slow loading pages are large image files. Images must be web-optimized and created with the appropriate image size.

Why is Page Speed important?

A webpage should load withing a few seconds. If the page takes too long for loading users will become frustrated and bounce from your website. Particularly for mobile devices, which often have limited bandwidth, it’s crucial for your business to focus on page speed. Keep in mind that more than 50% of the web traffic comes from mobile devices and this number is growing. Apart from loosing clients, a slow loading website negatively affects your SEO. Google checks the loading time of websites and monitors bounce rates as they are an indicator for a good or bad user experience. A speed optimized website is therefore important to rank well on Google.

How can i check the page speed of my website?

You can easily test how fast your website is with some online page speed analysis tools. They are completely free to use. Results for the loading site speed vary depending on the server location. Some of the tools let you choose from where your website should be tested. For my Costa Rican clients I mostly target the US American market so I usually test from a server location in California.

PAGE SPEED INSIGHTS

… is a service provided by Google. You can toggle between the results for the desktop and mobile version of your website. It shows a score that summarize the performance along with recommendations how to improve your page speed.

GTMETRIX

… is another free tool that provides a performance score and a report showing the current state of your website. You also get detailed information about the bottlenecks and how to avoid render-blocking resources.

PINGDOM

… can test your website from different server locations and will show you a page speed score, page size and load time along with some information for a better page performance.

Get Professional Help

The results and suggestions provided by these analysis tools are quite technical. An experienced webmaster however will quickly know how to achieve substantial improvements for your website’s page speed and the overall site quality.