How to Monitor Your Web Page Speed
What can you do to improve the web page speed of your website? There are lots of things you can do but if you want to really improve the website speed, you need to take a deeper look at what’s causing your website problems and how your overall site and images are constructed. Identifying the real reason why your website is running slow and making the necessary changes are the most important aspects of website speed optimization. Below are some simple tips to improve the performance and speed of your website.
A few simple tips to improve the web page speed of your website: Use good SEO practices:
- Chose a fast hosting plan like a cloud or VPS server, avoid shared hosting
- A fast loading template and plugins, all well coded and updated
- Optimize image sizes by using a compression plugin
- Use a caching and minification plugin with lazy loading images
Also, optimize your URL, title, header, and content so that search engines can pick up on what the page is about. Avoid long delays between pages loading, site loading time can be a known issue with Shopify stores with complex or third party themes. Use common SEO techniques to improve website loading time such as title/header optimizing, avoiding duplicate content, adding consistent accesility alt text in the meta tag, using alternative image names and alt text in images. The overall page should consistently communicate to search engines exactly what it is about for example the URL, the images, the content and the links should all create a cohesive piece of information that can be read understood an indexed by the search engine algorithms. Do not add unnecessary flash objects, JavaScript code, or animation and keep your page sizes as small as possible. It’s best to add videos that link to Youtube or Vimeo rather than serve them from your site. Avoid using software or un-trusted, dated plugins that will delete cookies, or causes bugs, code conflict or errors.
These are the first steps for increasing your website speed. We mentioned some simple things that you can do to reduce page size and improve your website loading time, but the real way to increase your page size is to remove unwanted elements from your page, and have non-essential content hidden from mobile devices or use an AMP plugin. You should do this without sacrificing content or reducing the visual appeal of your page. The result is a page that is easier to read and navigate. As you can see, there are many ways to increase the size of your website without sacrificing the important content and visual aspects that make your site unique.
Here are the four best tools to monitor your website load time the Google themselves recommend:
Google Page Speed Insights (Lighthouse) https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
Web Page Test https://www.webpagetest.org/
GT Metrix https://gtmetrix.com/
Pingdom https://tools.pingdom.com/