Why is it important to measure loading speed?
We're sure we don't need to tell you how important it is for your website to load quickly. Not just for SEO and rankings -Google penalizes pages that load slowly- but also for the user experience. Ideally, your entire website should be super user-friendly so users not only visit and stay for a long time, but also come back 🙂
Studies on the subject reveal that the average user waits about 3 seconds for a website to load, and if it doesn't, they simply go to another one. That's right, you need a very fast response time so users don't switch into “I'm out of here because this is taking too long” mode.
Below we show you two tools that we think are very good for determining whether your website is slow: YSlow.org and GTmetrix.
YSlow analyzes web pages and why they are slow based on the Yahoo search engine's rules for high-performance websites.
Its features are as follows:
Scores the web page based on one of three predefined rule sets or a user-defined set of rules;
Provides suggestions for improving page performance;
Summarizes the page's components;
Displays statistics about the page;
Provides tools for analyzing the page, including Smush.it™ and JSLint.
Available on:
Best practices and rules for running your website:
YSlow's page analysis is based on 23 rules:
- Minimize HTTP requests
- Use a Content Delivery Network
- Avoid empty src or href
- Add a cache-control Header
- Gzip components
- Put style sheets at the top
- Put scripts at the bottom
- Avoid CSS expressions
- Make Javascript and CSS external
- Reduce DNS lookups
- Minify Javascript and CSS
- Avoid redirects
- Remove duplicate scripts
- Configure ETags
- Make AJAX cacheable
- Use GET for AJAX requests
- Reduce the number of DOM elements
- Avoid 404 pages
- Reduce cookie size
- Use cookie-free domains for components
- Avoid filters
- Do not scale images in HTML
- Make favicon.ico small and cacheable
GTmetrix gives you information about your website's loading speed and recommendations for optimizing it.
Its key features include:
- Loading speed and YSlow score and recommendations
- Page loading details (time, size, number of requests)
- Various analysis options
- History report
Screenshot with the result:
And if, after running one or both tests, you realize that your page's loading speed is quite poor, call or write to us. Our Cloud Pros are experts who will help you and give you advice on the subject to make your page fly!