Website page speed is a key factor in ranking well in search engine results
That’s according to many authorities like Yoast SEO and Google themselves have indicated. And then there is the human factor. People like and use speedy sites with a good user experience. They don’t like clunky and slow websites.
In fact, Kissmetrics stated “47% of consumers expect a web page to load in 2 seconds or less” and “40% of people abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load” (my emphasis). That claim was made back in 2011 and site visitors’ attention spans have only gotten worse.
The page speed tools
If you’ve read the 7 types of free tools to get more affiliate campaign clicks post, you’ll know I love sharing free resources that help affiliate marketers achieve success!
This post is just more of that good stuff. Web page speed and site load speed can be thought of as relatively the same thing as websites tend to load one page at a time.
1. Google Developer Tools
You should already have this. You should know about Google’s PageSpeed Insights. But do you know about Lighthouse? This tool helps you simulate and assess page speed in real time, right from the Chrome Dev Tools bar. As a bonus it runs an audit on best practices, so you can discover other ways to improve trust and accessibility signals, which also play into SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).
2. Varvy & Pingdom
I include these together as they’re covering a very similar area – speed test reports.
Varvy’s pagespeed tool is accompanied by a full report on where your website could improve. Examples such as render-blocking Javascript, lack of browser caching, and un-minified script and CSS will show up, allowing you to fix them and boost your optimization.
Pingdom offers slightly different insights to Varvy, but doesn’t have as many suggestions of how to correct issues. Use both to get the clearest picture. However, Pingdom does allow you to sign up and will test your site’s speed every minute, which might be useful for high-traffic sites to show problems up fast.
3. WordPress plugin – Jetpack
Jetpack offers some fantastic features for free. One of the ones that I recommend you get yesterday is their CDN capability. This means you can host pictures and video from servers all around the world, and users just pick the one closest to them. Another is the lazy load feature, which means images aren’t loaded until needed. There are plenty of other features available in the paid plan, too.
However, you will need to do some fiddling to make sure Jetpack doesn’t accidentally add features you don’t need. For example, it has a tendency to load a massive CSS file in the front end that you don’t need at all. You can try these instructions here for ways to disable this (WARNING! always check on a test system and back up before trying any of these fixes and techniques!)
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