Best Website Speed Test Tools to Check your Site Load Time
If you have a website for your business then you must want that it should load fast and opens in a click. Generally there are two types of websites, static and dynamic. Static websites loads very fast because they do not have any database connections and all the content on these websites is static in nature but dynamic websites that includes CMS’s like wordpress, joomla, drupal etc. takes some time to load because of the various database connections it makes and almost all the content is dynamically fetched or loaded from the database. The speed of your website plays very important role for variety of reasons that are explained below.
Why Website Speed is Important?
More Visitors – Faster your website the more visitors you will get. This is the golden rule that you should be keeping in mind. It is a known fact that visitors or users do not like slow websites and they walk away from them if they find that the site taking time in loading web pages. Also you will get more page views if your site is very fast thus increasing your total revenue. A fast site also provides good user experience.
Better Rankings in Search Engines – Search Engines especially Google loves websites that have minimum loading time. Even if you have good content on your website but greater loading time then you will not be rank as you should be in search results. This is why many websites get penalized because they are taking too much time in loading pages. That is why Google constantly tells you to improve your site speed to be on a safer side and to rank higher in SERP’s.
How Website Speed is measured?
Generally website speed is measured in terms of load time in seconds. Here is a general benchmark for evaluating a website performance in terms of load time. Less is the load time the faster the website and greater the load time the slower it will be.
Load Time and Performance parameter
Less than 1 second – Very Fast
1 or more than one second – Fast
2 -3 seconds – Average
3 seconds or more – Slow
More than 5 seconds – Very Slow
How to check Website Speed?
You can check your website speed by free website speed check tools available on the internet. Here are some of the best tools to evaluate your website speed.
Best Free Tools to Check your Website Load Time
Pingdom Website Speed Test – This is a very popular tool that is used to check website load time. Just enter your URL and press Test Now button to see your website load time detailed report.
Pingdom Website Speed
Google Page Speed – Another very good and trustworthy tool from Google to check your website speed or load time. It also checks your website load time on mobile devices and gives you useful suggestions on how to reduce your website load time.
http://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
Google Page Speed
Other Good Free Tools to check website load time or speed
Web Page Test – www.webpagetest.org
GTmetrix – gtmetrix.com
PageScoring Website Speed Test – www.pagescoring.com/website-speed-test
Web Site Test – www.websitetest.com
Useful Tips to Improve Website Speed
Implement Cache & Compression – You should implement some sort of cache system in your website to make it load faster. Cache make the files load faster as they are served from the cache files stored on server disk or memory and not the database. Compression makes the size of the files smaller so that they can be served at blazing speeds. gzip compression is very good in compressing the files to very small size. If you are using cms like wordpres then you can install the W3 Total Cache or WP Super Cache plugin to make your site load faster. For Drupal you can try Boost module, memcache or drupal’s in-built cache system.
Minify Javascript and CSS files – Javascript and CSS files eats lots of bandwidth and server calls, so you should minify or compress these files on your website. Also if possible avoid using any unnecessary javascript code on your website page.
Optimize your Website – You should also optimize your website for better performance and see that the overhead of your database queries is less.
Use Good & Fast Web Hosting – Make sure that you buy powerful enough web hosting from a good and trustworthy hosting company. A fast server can make drastic improvements in your website load time. If possible avoid shared hosting and get a good vps server for your website.
Some Good VPS Hosting Service Providers
About Author
Akshat Verma
A Professional Blogger, Web Developer, Hardware Enthusiast, Gamer, Geek and Founder of many other websites. He holds M.Tech degree in IT and B.E degree in Computer Science & Engineering.