How fast is your website? How fast does it load? Regardless of what Google Blog or other search engines say about speed affecting seo and page rank, there will be no business success if people leave because of a slow page load. The Internet speeds for mobile are notched up dramatically as you will now see advertisements for 4G speed. If the website for your business is slow to load? It will become a dinosaur and be passed by.
As a business owner...
- You don't want to be a programmer nor do you want to spend the hours necessary to keep up with the technical jargon.
- What you need to know is how fast your website load times are relative to your competitors. Also consider what your customers say is acceptable. Your website may be too slow simply because your customers say so. To have a tool to measure success will help you speak to the person(s) who are responsible for website design or graphics.
Here are three easy tools to analyze page load speed for your business website.
Pingdom - The Full Page Test loads a complete HTML page including all objects (images, CSS, JavaScripts, RSS, Flash and frames/iframes). It mimics the way a page is loaded in a web browser.
The load time of all objects is shown visually with time bars.
You can view the list of objects either in load order or as a hierarchy. The hierarchy view allows you to see which objects are linked to, for example a CSS file.
Every test also shows general statistics about the loaded page such as the total number of objects, total load time, and size including all objects.
Web Page Analyzer - free web site speed test to improve website performance. Enter a URL below to calculate page size, composition, and download time. The script calculates the size of individual elements and sums up each type of web page component. Based on these page characteristics the script then offers advice on how to improve page load time. Simple to use.
Google Webmaster Tools - In Webmaster Tools, Labs > Site Performance shows the speed of your website as experienced by users around the world as in the chart below. There is also a blog about site performance. Here is an example.
Other handy online business success tools:
- Firefox Add-on Page Speed an open source Firefox/Firebug add-on that evaluates the performance of web pages and gives suggestions for improvement.
- WebPagetest to measure page load speed.
- How to Analyze a Website for Business
- SEO Training Education Tools and Tips
Now you can measure the success and follow the principle: "Trust but verify".
