By Black Bear Design on 07/26/2016
Hi, this is Joel at Black Bear Design. I’m going to give you two quick tools that you can use to analyze your page speed, and maybe find some issues with your website that if fixed properly could make you rank better, and give your users a better experience. Two tools: GTmetrix, and the other one is PageSpeed Insights from Google. On Gtmetrix when you come to the front it’s a free tool. Just put your URL right in the box and hit analyze. You’ll see that it starts analyzing. While that’s working switch over to PageSpeed Insights. This is a tool directly from Google. When you go into Google just Google PageSpeed Insights, or Google PageSpeed, and you’ll come up to where you can analyze your website.
When you come into Gtmetrix and you are finished with analyzing the site you’ll get page like this. The site I analyzed is very fast, it’s very optimized, and it should rank pretty high for things that it’s posting. Page speed score 97%. That’s really, really good. A YSlow score of 93%. That is very, very good. If you can get As on both of those then you really have your site optimized very well. It will give you some items down here that you can work on to help improve your score.
The other things you want to take a look at is the page load time: .9 seconds. Very, very, very fast. If you can get your site to load in under two seconds then that is very fast. Two to three seconds is average. Three to five seconds it’s not bad, but you need to improve that load time some. .9 seconds is very, very fast. 20 requests: that’s very good. The average number of requests on a standard website is somewhere around 69, so if you see yours as falling around 60, or 80 that’s okay, that’s average.
We have this site very optimized. We’re going to have a lot of bells and whistles on it. It’s just to be optimized for search engines, to load fast, and to be very small . Average page size: show a lot of images. If you have a lot of HTML content you might see this bigger. It’s almost two megabytes is the standard page size. This page size is very small again. Load time: this is saying the average page load time is six seconds. I think that’s a little high, but as you can see this is less than one second on the one that we’re takin’ a look at here.
If you see a lot of green, load times that are low, if you see requests that are low, total page sizes that are low you know you’re very optimized. If you don’t, if you see yellow, or red, or any where under B, or C, or D then you want to take a look at all these things. See what you can fix. Some things are a lot easier to fix than others, so fix all the easy things, and look at the recommendations. Get someone to help you with the harder things. It’s all about getting that page really optimized, making it load fast, so the search engines will love it, and your people that are looking at it will love it. Especially if they’re on their mobile devices.
PageSpeed Insights will give you a little different perspective, but kind of the same things. They’ll just maybe help you understand it in some different ways. On desktop we’re looking at here it’s saying that it’s not really all that great. We’ve got some images that we need to fix. They’re saying that they’re large, so to compress those images, and actually it really only looks like one image that it’s saying is bad. It’s not necessarily something that I’m going to worry about on this specific site. On mobile this is saying that the speed, there are some definite things we could do to improve the speed on this mobile site. The same things that we were looking at on the desktop site. As far as user experience it looks very nice. Not really too much that we’re going to do to this. This is okay. We’re getting a great report from Gtmetrix. Page Insights is saying that we need to fix an image, which we’ll fix that image that says you need to fix.
Do what you can. Do the easy things first. You’ll give a bigger impact, knock ’em out, come back. Some things are just very, very difficult to fix. Some things you might not even fix. It’s all about how do we make it load as fast as possible, so people don’t have to sit. Especially on mobile devices when they might be on a 3G network, or an extended network, or even worse than that. How do we make it load fast for those guys. Thanks again. I hope this helped. Two free tools to take a look at.