One of the early onboarding tasks for new clients at Search IQ, is to perform a website speed test. The mindset today seems to be, that with almost unlimited bandwidth, why do we need to worry about how fast a webpage loads? Well, for starters, the majority of Google searches are done from mobile devices. And let’s face it, most mobile carriers either don’t have the data networks that rival the fiber networks wired to our homes and offices, or they throttle data speed.

So, what does that mean for your website?

Google has hinted on several occasions, that they may start penalizing slow loading websites in mobile search. Mobile users are “I want to go now”, and simply won’t put up with a slow site.
So, today we’re going to share a couple of tools with you, to eliminate slow!

First, we have to not only test the speed of our website, but if there are issues, figure out what is causing the slow down.

Our favorite free tool at Search IQ is from Pingdom, and can be found Here
Pingdom also offers a subscription based website monitoring platform, which we also highly recommend!

The Pingdom website speed test is easy to use. Enter your website URL, and select a location that you want to initiate the test from, and GO!
Pingdom will create a website report card, reporting your grade from “A” to “F” for several different categories.

The scoring is easy to understand, green is good, yellow not so good, red is bad.

Let’s break down the (3) major culprits that we often see, that slow down website load speed.

• Too Many Javascript and CSS files – Every time a web server has to open a file stored on disk, it adds more time to loading the web page on the user’s browser app. This fix is better left to a website designer, but it should be inexpensive. We are simply combining all of the external javascript and CSS files into one file.
• Lack of Browser Caching – Again, opening files repeatedly, slows down performance.  No caching – You order a pizza delivery, and a cold pizza shows up at the door 45 minutes later. Caching – You order a pizza delivery, and immediately open the door, and the pizza delivery guy is standing there with a piping hot pie!  If your site is on WordPress, we highly recommend W3 Total Cache plug in.
• Image Size – I can’t believe we are saying this in 2017, but image size is still one of the biggest factors attributing to slow page load.  The human eye can barely detect the difference between a 500kb and a 50kb image on a mobile browser.  TinyPNG is a great “free” image compression tool, and you can find it Here.  Remember to remove your previous image on WordPress pages, and re-add the new compressed version.

To Summarize, Google has indicated that slow loading sites are going to be/may already be penalized on rankings.  To detect any issues, run a site test at Pingdom.  And the (3) major issues we often find are: Too many files loading, Lack of a Caching plug in, and Image size.

If you have any questions, you can always reach us at Search IQ – Here