The loading time of a webpage is one of the most important things to consider nowadays. Based on a Google/SOASTA research, when the page load time rises from one second to five seconds, the bounce rate increases by 90%. Also, as measured by Google Analytics, 53% of mobile users will usually leave a page if it takes more than three seconds to load. A slow WordPress website means a drop in revenue, so faster is always better.
Google states that a website following the best practices should also have pages that weight less than 500KB. As you can see below, in the United States, most websites are usually busting that limit and weight actually six times more than that.
Now, how can we test the page speed of a WordPress website? How can we tell what should be optimized or not? I’m personally using five different services based on what I want to measure:
- Google PageSpeed Insights
- Pingdom Website Speed Test
- GTmetrix Website Speed and Performance Optimization Tool
- DotCom-Tools Website Speed Test
- WebPageTest
In this series, we’ll review these five online services and highlight the unique features of each of them. However, before that, we’ll start first with some advice and things to keep in mind before testing your website speed.
Please note that this is not a “Top 5 of the best free tools” to test your WordPress website, so the order of the services reviewed is not relevant. Also, I’m aware there are many other services, free or not, that can be used to test your website speed. Feel free to share in the comments any useful service you know for optimizing the speed of a website!
