An Overview Of PageSpeed Tools

PageSpeed tools are an extremely helpful resource when it comes to ensuring your site’s visitors have an excellent digital experience. After all, visitor experience has a key role to play in ensuring more views, retaining more traffic and being more relevant in the search engine listings.

One key element of any engaging and successful website is always its performance – the speed at which it loads, its responsiveness, and how rapidly it grabs the attention of the user. PageSpeed tools are, for this reason, the ideal way of understanding how best to improve your site’s loading time so it can be turned into a highly competitive advantage.

Why Audit And Assess Page Speed?

Anyone who is running a website will be thinking about how they can get more visibility and attention alone, and a primary strategy involves offering leads an excellent online experience. This experience forms a major component of the customers journey, taking them from the very first stage of getting to grips with your brand to finally converting them into paying customers.

To reach this end, they have to pass through your website and content, so you need to make your customer/brand connection as deep as possible to attract more visitors and convert more leads.

Having engaging content and a strong visual identity is vital for this. However, if your target market struggles to access and consume your content this causes a host of issues. Therefore, page speed and performance form the foundations of any website and can help in a significant way with digital marketing strategies.

Pages should be made more responsive and speedy for two primary reasons. Firstly, visitors can enjoy a far better user experience and this will make them keen to have more brand contact resulting in lower bounce rates, more page views and longer visits – something that will increase the opportunity to convert.

Secondly, web performance with fast loading sites mean that Google will rank them more highly and this allows more visitors to be attracted to the site. Both of these things taken together will give far greater visibility.

Which PageSpeed Tools Can Improve Performance?

Since boosting page speed is vital when it comes to getting a brand noticed online, finding ways to achieve this goal is key. Luckily, there are a number of tools which can prove vital in this regard. Speed test tools analyse your website looking for codes, resources and elements that can all be optimised to ensure better site performance for users.

These elements include plugins and scripts which take too long to load, images that are too heavy, and render-blocking CSS or JavaScript. There are eight different page speed tools which can provide valuable insights so you can create a website that is truly competitive, and we’ll look at them here:

• Stage Analyzer – this tool gives an objective, comprehensive and thorough view of how websites are performing as well as which steps can be taken to improve them. By checking the various elements of SEO along with image issues and potential errors, Analyzer is able to recommend which practices will enable to site owner to get the lead over their competitors.
• Google PageSpeed Insights – every SEO strategy’s primary goal is to gain a higher position on the Google search engine, so it makes sense to go right to the source to find out more about your website’s performance. The Google PageSpeed Insights tool is powerful but simple to use. It analyses websites and then offers helpful suggestions about how they can be improved, giving them a number or score based on the results. This score indicates the website’s user experience quality and how that impacts on SEO.
• GT Metrix – this tool helps site owners give their visitors an even better user experience by analysing the website searching for bottlenecks and errors, measuring performance according to browser and country, and giving a score that is based on a range of objective statistics.
• Pingdom Speed Test – this helpful solution is a handy tool from Pingdom for analysing the performance of a website. It carries out a similar analysis to all of the above-mentioned tools but this test utilises a visual system that enables the user to rapidly pinpoint the primary issues which must be addressed when it comes to optimisation of content and code.
• Web Page Test – although this isn’t an especially intuitive or simple solution, it boasts some excellent features which are worth exploring, including its ability to offer advanced website analysis based on preset browsers and devices as well as a visual comparison tool for some benchmarks.
• KeyCDN Speed Test – this is KeyCDN’s own tool which analyses and offers insights about the performance of any given page. Taking its inspiration from Google PageSpeed Insights, KeyCDN Speed Test gives users a score for optimisation and speed along with handy hints about how your website can be made more appealing to both visitors and Google alike.
• Varvy PageSpeed Optimization – not so much a tool as a class, Varvy PageSpeed offers a well-organised, comprehensive and simple solution to identify all the key elements that are slowing pages down and what can be done to resolve those issues. Everything is categorised and explained using clear examples.
• YSlow – this tool is different from the above items in that it isn’t actually a web-based tool. Rather, it’s an open-source browser extension that is available for use on Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera and other browsers. Although this solution is somewhat simpler than the others and offers more limited insights, it offers the benefit of instant reviews of tiny changes made to coding when working in order to boost its performance.

User experience is so important when it comes to digital visibility that you’ll probably need to use several of these tools to improve your website. Make sure to choose a combination of tools that offer not only excellent insights and analysis but also more SEO-focused services for a comprehensive approach. This will ensure that you achieve the best possible results.