Website speed is one of the important factor in Search Engine Optimization . Users as well as search engines never like a slow loading page. So it is very important to find out the things which slow down your site .
Your website speed is an important reason for determining Google page rank. So it is important to keep a score high score. If you have a slow website you are going to lose your valuable visitors and search engine spiders .
So here is the winning formula
Quality content + good website speed = High Page Rank
High Page Rank = More visitors
More visitors = More Money.
How to find the Website Speed?
There are lots of professional tool to find your website speed. You will also get valuable suggestions to improve your website speed . Here I want to share some of the free tools to check your website speed. So you can easily check the website speed and figure out the slow down factors.
Page Speed Online
PageSpeed Online is a Google tool to analyse performance of your web pages. Based on the analyses it will give suggestions for making your website faster.You can find out the elements which is slowing down your website.
Using Page Speed Online you can generate reports for a page as it appears in desktop browsers and on mobile devices.
Here you can see suggestion from Google page speed online. Here you can find your score out of 100. I Optimized my WordPress blog well , so got a high score of 89.
You can see the suggestions on the left side . So I have 2 medium priority item and 12 low priority item remaining for better optimization . You can also see a Critical Path Explorer which gives a graphical view of your pages load performance.
Take a Speed test today at Page Speed , Are you a Google Speed Champion ?
YSlow
YSlow is a free tool from Yahoo! . You will get suggestions to improve your website speed.
WebPagetest
WebPagetest gives a waterfall view of your sites load time and a detail checklist for optimizing your website .
How to Increase Your Website Speed?
Now you got your website score and suggestions. Start Optimizing your website based on the suggestions. In most cases you got high priority suggestions like leverage browser caching and enable compression.
Leverage browser caching
We can reduce the load time of the static resources by setting an expiry date or maximum age in the HTTP headers. So this will instructs browser to load the previously downloaded resources from the local disk . So this will cut the load time and increase your page speed.
Here we can set expires headers for our static resources like Favicon, Images, CSS and java script. Copy this code and add it your .htacess file.
1 | <IfModule mod_expires.c> |
Enable Compression
Compressing resources helps to save band width and increase page speed. You can either use gzip or deflate to enable compression.
Add this lines to your .htaccess file . This will compress your text,html,javascript,css and xml. Here we are using deflate to enable compression.
1 | # Enable Compression |
Other recommendations to Increase the Website speed
- Reduce the amount of java script parsed during the page load
- Eliminate uncacheable landing page redirects.
- Use CSS instead of inline coding.
- Optimize images(properly formatted and compressed images).
- remove flash elements from your site.
Well Optimized website always get good traffic and ranking . So Take your Speed test today.