3 Services to Measure Your Website Speed

Website speed is quite an important factor nowadays when the internet is used very widely. From a user experience perspective, page loading speed is a very important detail, so Google also attaches great importance to this. Having a fast website provides you with a significant advantage for ranking higher in Google results. In fact, Google itself stated that it is one of the signals used by its algorithm to rank pages. And research shows that Google may be measuring the time to first byte in particular when considering page speed.

Although page speed is often confused with the concept of “site speed,” it actually refers to the loading speed of a page on your site. It covers the time it takes for the content on the page to be fully displayed.

A web page consists of different assets such as HTML, JavaScript, CSS, images, and videos. Each of these makes requests to create what you see on your website. Generally, the more requests you have, the slower your website loads. This is not always the case, but it is true most of the time.

There are many tools available to measure your page speed and how it averages. Through these tools, by measuring your page speed, you have the chance to see what kind of experience your visitors get while browsing your site. It is also very important to approach professionally and regularly check and measure a metric to which Google gives this much importance. Slow page speed means that search engines can crawl fewer pages using the allocated crawl budget, and this can negatively affect your indexing.

Why Is Your Page Speed Important?

Page speed is a critical factor when it comes to placing your website higher in Google’s search engine results. If your website is not at the same level as the best 10 organic pages, you will not be on the first page. And the vast majority of search engine users do not consider the second page.

It is no secret that the top 10 results will account for most of the clicks. Therefore, focusing on page speed is very important to have a successful company and a website that converts. Backlink recently conducted a study analyzing more than one million search engine result pages (SERPs) on Google. They worked to find the most common factors among sites in the top 10 results. And quickly, they discovered that the average page loading speed for any website is a higher ranking factor.

We will share some tools that will help you measure and improve your page speed.

PageSpeed Insights

PageSpeed Insights, one of Google’s services, is one of the tools used to measure your site speed. PageSpeed Insights (PSI) reports the performance of a page on both mobile and desktop devices and provides suggestions on how this page can be improved.

PageSpeed Insights provides both laboratory and field data about a page. Laboratory data is useful for debugging performance issues as it is collected in a controlled environment. However, it may not capture real-world bottlenecks.

This free tool is quite famous because it provides information about your loading time issues. PageSpeed Insights analyzes the most important factors from bad CSS to images, browser caching, and plugins that can harm your loading time stability for both desktop and mobile websites.

PageSpeed Insights presents a distribution of metrics so that developers can understand the range of FCP, FID, LCP, and CLS values for that page or resource. This distribution is also divided into three categories. These categories are Good, Needs Improvement, and Poor, shown with green, orange, and red bars. You can also see a similar situation in WordPress for SEO and Readability.

For example, seeing 14% within the orange bar of FCP shows that 14% of all observed FCP values are between 1000 ms and 3000 ms. This data represents an aggregated view of all page loads during the previous 28-day collection period.

Pingdom Speed Test

Pingdom offers a speed test developed to measure your website speed and understand loading times.

At first glance, the basic free speed test may seem like a relatively simple test tool, but once you sign up, all other features become available to you. There is a 14-day trial period where you can find out if it is worth it before paying for Pingdom. Even if you are thinking of using the tool on a paid basis, definitely take advantage of this trial period and try to explore all aspects of it.

Returning to Pingdom’s free speed test tool accessible to everyone, you can follow these simple steps to use it.

1. First, select your site’s URL and paste it into the space on Pingdom’s homepage.
2. Select the point closest to your target audience for the most accurate measurement. (Pingdom speed test is conducted from certain points. These are: Tokyo - Japan, Frankfurt - Germany, London, United Kingdom, Washington D.C., America, San Francisco - America, Sydney - Australia, and Sao Paulo - Brazil.)
3. After marking the center closest to the region where your site is commonly used, you can choose to start the test and see results about your page within a few seconds.

KeyCDN Website Speed Test

KeyCDN website speed test is a full page speed test that can be conducted from 10 different locations worldwide. Also, KeyCDN is a free speed test tool. It allows the performance of any HTML page to be tested and measured.

The test results also provide a breakdown of requests, content size, and loading time. The Website Speed Test tool can be used to see where improvements can be made as well as to evaluate your website’s performance. You can use KeyCDN to significantly reduce the latency of your website.

We talked about how important page speed is for Google and likewise how page speed can affect user experience. Based on all of this, you can improve your page speed with the help of free tools that can test the speed of your pages and provide your visitors with a much better experience.

Abdullah Altunbaş

Content Writer

Netinternet Bilişim Teknolojileri A.Ş.'de teknik konularda liderlik yapıyorum. 15 yıldır bu alanda çalışıyorum ve özellikle sistem yönetimi, ağ teknolojileri ve yazılım geliştirme konularına odaklanıyorum.