How to Check the Loading Speed of your Website

Statistics and online studies are constantly showing us just how important loading speed is when it comes to promoting a successful website. However, despite most businesses understanding how crucial having a speedy website can be, it can sometimes be forgotten as companies focus furiously on generating traffic or creating more content.

According to a study published by the Aberdeen group, every extra second of delay associated with loading your website pages decreases customer satisfaction by 16%, conversion rates by 7%, and page views by 11%. Added together, this equals a huge impact on your webpage, and your brand. To make sure that you’re not falling behind the crowd, here are some tips on how you can check the load speed of your website.

Tools Provided by Google

Some of the best applications out there when it comes to analyzing your website speed, are produced by the company that you are most looking to impress. Google has a number of useful features for business owners to access when they want to improve the state of their business.

Google Page Speed Insights, for example, is one of the best places that any company owner can start when evaluating the performance of his or her web pages. Not only is it ideal for checking out your web speed, but it will also analyze various different factors throughout your website, without costing you a penny. All you need to do is type your URL and hit the button marked ‘Analyze’. Google will generate a report from both a desktop and mobile perspective so that you can discover which aspects you need to fix, which parts you are doing right, and which factors could be improved.

A lot of companies throughout the world utilize Google Analytics as a regular part of managing their business. If you are already running Google analytics and don’t want to have to track down another tool to assess your web speed, then you can simply run a report from here. The analytics check is a little bit more basic than some of the other checks that you can find throughout the internet, but it can provide a good launching pad for you to get started on optimizing your website. To find the speed check, go into the “Behavior” section of Google Analytics, then select the “Page Timings” link.

Improving Your Load Time

Once you have established that you have issues with your web page loading time, the chances are you’ll want to find a way to fix them. Most of the time, all you need is a handy plugin to compress certain areas of your website and provide an efficient content delivery network. Of course, the amount of work that you have ahead of you will depend on the extent of your issue and the problems that you have faced.