How to Check Website Speed?

A successful website heavily depends on its speed. For example, a one-second delay decreases customer satisfaction by 16% and causes a 7% conversion loss. However, functionality is also highly important; in most cases, the features that increase your functionality decrease your speed. So, having a good ratio between speed and functionality is crucial, and it depends on your website type.

Website speed is the time it takes web browsers to fully load a website and its web pages, images, videos, etc.

It can be impacted by many things, including the distance between the access point or end-user and the server the website is hosted on, the type of content it has, the Internet connection, the device it's accessed from, operating system, browser, etc.

Website speed is important because it drastically impacts:

• Conversion Rates
  By improving website loading speeds by 0.1 seconds, conversation rates can increase by as much as 8.4% for retail consumers and 10.1% for travel consumers

• Customer Engagement
  The faster your website loads, the more customers are willing to engage and interact with it, which greatly impacts engagement

• Average Order Value
  If you improve your website's loading speed, it is highly likely that your average order value will increase if you sell products and services online

• Bounce Rate
  Higher website loading speeds decrease bounce rates as well

A website is considered to have a good speed when it loads within three seconds or two seconds for eCommerce websites.

However, if a website's loading speed exceeds the three-second mark, the end-user experience is compromised and can lead to negative reviews on behalf of users.

Moreover, around 44% of users will share this negative experience with their friends and tell them not to visit your website.

4 Best Website Speed Test Tools

The best way to check your website speed is by using tools that perform test speeds. Here are some of the best tools available for testing speed:

1. Google PageSpeed Insights

This is one of the better website speed test tools because it's Google that provides the insight and is best suited for experts and developers. It gives your website a score between 0 and 100. The higher the score is, the better your website speed. It performs tests for both desktop and mobile and gives you suggestions on how to improve your speed as well.

2. Pingdom

Much like Google PageSpeed Insights, Pingdom also gives your website a score between 0 and 100. However, this tool is easier to navigate and beginner-friendly. You can test your website speed based on location, and Pingdom will also give you suggestions for improving your website speed. It also tells you which resources take longer to load and gives you information about page size, number of requests, and more. However, a disadvantage of this tool is that it recognized only Gzip as a compression type and nothing else.

3. GTMetrix

This is one of the best tools to test whether your website uses the appropriate techniques for caching, code optimization, etc. It is perfect for beginners and quite similar to the Google PageSpeed Insights tool since it was updated. It allows users to perform many tests across different browsers, locations, and connections. However, one thing worth knowing is that you shouldn't take the high speed in the Fully Loaded Time tab into consideration because all tests are performed on the tool's server in Canada and can be misleading.

4. WebPageTest

This is a free speed testing tool that tests your speed across different browsers, devices, and locations. It also gives you reports that help you identify issues and improve your website speed. It offers more advanced data and insights compared to other free tools, and it also gives you the option to perform a more simple test if that's what you need. Additionally, WebPageTest gives you information regarding your site's security, and it tests content compression, caching of static resources, and first server response time.

Website speed and SEO go hand-in-hand, affecting SEO because it determines how the website will rank in Google's algorithm. Essentially, the greatest impact that website speed has on SEO is through:

• Search Engine Ranking
  The slower your website is, the lower it will be ranked by search engines. Google especially emphasizes website loading speeds when it ranks websites. And seeing as Google has over 4.3 billion users and generates over 5.6 billion searches per day, it is a massive potential customer pool you can't miss out on

• User Experience
  If a website takes too long to load, it will drive away users even if the day is a second or two. This is especially relevant for eCommerce websites and online stores, where 79% of customers will leave the website and not return if they experience slower loading speeds. For example, Google takes user experiences into consideration when ranking a website and will rank a fast-loading website with positive user experiences significantly higher

You can increase your website speed by using website speed optimization techniques which will improve your site's performance. Additionally, a better-optimized site also helps improve customer retention, keep customers on your site longer, increase sales, etc.

Optimizing your website can be a challenging process for beginners because it can involve:

• Finding a faster web host - This can be especially challenging because you cannot know how fast a provider is until you use their services for a longer period of time. However, if you choose Verpex as your provider, you can test out any plan you want and see the quality and speed of the services first-hand for 45 days before you have to commit to a specific hosting plan

• Delivering different versions of your site based on your customers' location

• Combining or delaying some resources

However, there is also good news for beginners, especially those with a WordPress website. Namely, there are basic tools that can be used to increase the speed of WordPress sites that are simpler to implement and easy to understand.

The speed of your website is critical to its success and your business' success overall. It impacts user experience, customer retention, SEO, search engine rankings, sales, website traffic, etc. Basically, if your website does not load fast enough, customers will leave and choose a competitor's site instead.

So, to prevent this, you can use some of the tools listed in this article to see where you stand, what you need to do to improve your website speed, and implement the appropriate optimization tools to get you where you want to be!