Patience is a virtue. But if you’re running a website, just forget that quote.
You see, patience is the last thing on your website visitor’s mind.
If your page takes ages to load, visitors will get frustrated and leave. No matter how great your content is.
After all, what’s the point of great content if users can’t access it on time?
Unsurprisingly, Google’s research found that by the time your page loads for 3 seconds, the probability of bounce would have increased by 32%.
Due to website visitors’ behavior, Google has stated that speed is a ranking signal for both desktop and mobile.
Beyond that, RankBrain watches users’ behavior on Google searches. Therefore, having a high bounce rate due to slow site speed could harm your site rankings.
Over the years, web pages have become heavier with more scripts and media content. How do you achieve the balance between website functionality and speed?
Here are 5 free speed tools to reduce your website load time.
1. Pingdom
As a result of its ease of use, Pingdom is one of the most popular speed test tools. When people use a website speed tool, they want to know their website speed and how to increase it.
Fortunately, Pingdom provides a simple user interface to achieve both. To use the Pingdom tool to test your website, go to the tool page and enter your website address.
Then, select a server location for your test. To gain the best insights possible about your user experience, select a server location closest to where your ideal visitors live.
After clicking on the drop-down, you’ll find 7 servers across 5 continents to test your website speed.
Once you select one, click on the “Start Test” button. You’ll see the speed details of your website such as the load time, performance grade, number of requests, and page size. See the results for a website below:
Also, there are more details when you scroll down the page. Pingdom will show you parts of your page that need improvements to reduce your load time and increase your general performance.
If your website has performance issues, you’ll see the parts of your website responsible and how to eliminate these issues.
A point I want you to note here is that testing your homepage alone is insufficient. Test individual pages too, especially popular ones. No two pages will have the same speed and you need to optimize the slow ones.
Apart from these basic features that Pingdom offers, there are other important features if you’re willing to use the paid version of the tool. These include uptime monitoring, page speed monitoring, transaction monitoring, server monitoring, and real user monitoring (RUM).
The uptime monitoring tool allows you to know when your website is down and inaccessible to visitors. If you run an eCommerce website or sell products on your website, downtime means loss of money and profits.
The page speed report will show you how fast your page loads over a period of time.
Real user monitoring requires that you add code to your website. It will then monitor the page speed when there’s a visitor on your website. This gives you a more accurate view than the simple speed test.
Another feature you get is alerts about different changes to your website. For instance, if your website suddenly goes down or your page speed decreases substantially, you’ll get an alert in your email, as an SMS, or app notifications.
If you have a simple website, the free version of Pingdom is good enough for your needs. However, a paid version would be best if you run a big website and little changes can affect your revenues.
2. Google mobile speed test
Mobile traffic has grown in importance over the years. For instance, a study found that about 60% of Google searches occur on mobile devices.
Added to that, Google announced in 2018 that page speed is a ranking factor for mobile searches. If you want to increase your organic traffic, then you need to make your website mobile-responsive and fast. The first step is to test your page speed for mobile devices.
To do this, you can use the think with Google mobile speed test. Go to the page and enter your website address. Click on the arrow button to carry out your test.
The results will show you your website’s loading time on mobile and the estimated visitor loss due to your loading time.
When you scroll further down the page, you’ll find steps to take to improve your website speed. To receive more recommendations, click on “Generate Report” and enter your email address and other details.
After a few minutes, you’ll receive the recommendations into your inbox. Here’s the 10-page report I received:
This gives you a checklist of steps to take to lower your website load time. Going further down the results page, you have access to 2 more tools. One is “Benchmark industry leaders” which helps to compare your website speed with that of industry leaders.
The second tool helps to evaluate the impact of a faster website.
This way, you can see how a faster website affects your business’s bottom line.
3. TinyPNG
Some of the biggest contributors to heavy page sizes and slow speeds are images. When you reduce your page size, you can reduce your page load time.
Therefore, one important speed optimization task to carry out on your website is reducing your image size. You’ll find many tools that can cut down your image size and retain quality at the same time.
In this post, I’ll be talking about TinyPNG. This is one of the most popular image optimization tools. Added to that, it’s simple to use.
Despite its name, TinyPNG allows you to reduce the size of JPEGs too. With this tool, you can compress 500 images a month for free with a maximum image size of 5 MB.
You can also upload 20 images at a time and from your Dropbox account. Except you run a large website, this should be able to meet your needs.
Even if you need to compress more images, TinyPNG does that at a low cost. To compress an image on TinyPNG, go to the website and upload the image.
After uploading the image or images, you can then download the compressed images, save them to Dropbox or download a zip file of the images.
When you compress images on your website, it reduces your page size substantially.
4. YUI compressor
Having overbloated javascript and CSS files on your website can increase your page size and cause it to slow down. Luckily, the YUI Compressor is a tool that compresses Javascript and CSS files.
However, using YUI compressor can be complicated if you’re not a developer. One way is to use the command prompt.
But you can also use an app like PiliApp that allows you to paste your code to minify it. Also, you have the option to upload the file.
If you’re not convenient with working on code, you can find someone experienced to do that for you.
5. W3 Total Cache
If you use the WordPress content management system on your website, the W3 Total Cache plugin will help to improve your website speed. Some functions of this plugin include managing your cache, minifying code, and even managing a CDN.
How do you use this plugin on your website? The first step is to install the plugin. Navigate to plugins on your WordPress dashboard and click on “Add New.” Search for the plugin and install and activate it.
After this, you have to configure the plugin as there are many settings to put in place. Go to general settings in the plugin.
One of the options you need to enable is your page cache as this helps your website to load faster. It achieves this by minimizing the time to load static elements.
Another setting you should enable is minify. This helps to shrink your website code without any downside on your website functionality. With this option, you won’t need to use the YUI compressor.
Also, it’s important to enable the browser cache as this helps to keep static resources on your visitors’ browsers. Thus, your website will load faster for returning visitors as there’s no need to load the static resources again.
There are other settings on the plugin to improve your website performance. But those I mentioned are some of the most important.
After your configuration, you’ll see an increase in your website speed within a short time. And another catch is that you only have to set it once and continue to reap its benefits.
Conclusion
Achieving a high website speed is vital if you want to keep visitors on your website and achieve your marketing and sales goals. However, you need the right tools to achieve this.
Here, I’ve shown you 5 tools that help to track your site speed, compress images, and minimize website code. Better still, these tools are available free of charge.
You can start using these tools today to achieve a faster website, a better user experience, and higher search rankings.
What steps are you taking to increase your website speed? Let me know in the comments!
Thank you for this information.
This is absolutely great. Thanks Olumide.