Poor website performance is one of the most widespread problems for business websites, yet it’s the most essential one hurting your business on many levels, from lost customers to bad reputation.
These easy-to-use tools will help you solve the problem.
Despite what some people may think, site speed is not a purely technical issue. Marketers have been talking about the necessity to speed up your page load for ages. Not only does poor page load time hurt your site usability, but it also hinders your rankings (by screwing your page engagement metrics), conversions, social media marketing campaign performance and so on.
Fixing the page load time issue is not that easy though. It does take come development budget and good diagnostics tools. Luckily, I can help you with the latter:
Page Speed Insights
Google’s Page Speed Insights measures your page speed and provides PageSpeed suggestions to make your web site faster.
The PageSpeed Score ranges from 0 to 100 points. A score of 85 or above means your page speed is optimal. The tool distinguishes two main criteria: How fast your page above-the-fold loads and how fast the whole page loads. Each page is tested for mobile and desktop experience separately.
Each PageSpeed suggestion is rated based on how important it is.
Pingdom
Pingdom monitors your site and reports if your site seems slow or down. It operates a network of over 60 servers to test your website from all over the world, which is very important for a global business website because your server location effects in which parts of the world your site reports well.
Pingdom also has a free tool you can test here. While Pingdom is mostly known as Uptime monitoring solution (you can read about Uptime here), it also does performance monitoring.
Because I monitor a lot of metrics for many websites, I use Cyfe to integrate Pingdom stats into my website monitoring dashboard:
WP Super Cache
WP Super Cache turns your dynamic WordPress blog pages into static HTML files for the majority of your users. This way your web server serves static files instead of processing the heavier WordPress PHP scripts.
This plugin will help your server cope with traffic spikes. It makes the pages faster to load, and stops those traffic overloads from happening in the case of a viral hit.
If you operate a huge database-driven website, a better solution for you would be setting up a content delivery network.
Incapsula
Speaking of your website being slow in remote parts of the world, Incapsula is a premium tools helping you to solve that problem. The platform offers a reliable Content Delivery Network, i.e. a network of servers all over the world allowing your site visitors to load files from the server located closer to them.
This means your site is fast wherever your future customers choose to load it from.
If you want to know more about how CDN works, here’s a very good resource to read and bookmark.
Compressor.io
Compressor.io is a handy tool to optimize your image size to allow for faster page load. As most of web pages have images these days, this is a must-bookmark and use tool.
Compressor.io reduces the size of your images while maintaining a high quality. You’ll be surprised to find no difference in your images before and after compression.
The tool supports the following image formats: .jpg, .png, .gif, .svg. I have found it invaluable to animated GIF compression because all the tools I use produce really huge images.
The tool is absolutely free and there’s no need to register to use it. Your files will be stored on the servers for 6 hours and then deleted, so don’t forget to download your optimized images!
Have I missed any essential tool or resource? Please add a comment below!
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