Are the sales that much affected by the speed of your website? Well, this is why site speed’s importance is increasing day-by-day as every business wants their website to deliver a great user experience, and Google announced it as a ranking factor as well. A website with lesser page load time and enhanced speed performs a way better than others as speedy website delights more customers. But today, site speed is more of an indicator than a ranking factor as with average speed, you can still get quite a good ranking, but the speedier your website is, the better results you will get.

Here’s why site speed really matters and still a big issue-

Impatient buyers

From a customer’s point of view, you will never want or go through a site that takes forever to load such that you will experience an emotion of anger or frustration. Instead, you will rather switch to the other website. People who are scanning your site don’t have the patient to sit around and waiting long for efficient functioning. The longer they wait, the more interest they will lose.

Affects SEO

A speedier website can help to improve your SEO. Site speed does not just affect the owners, but all the internet users are affected as well such that speed reflects the response of your site to its request. Speed is a factor that determines where your website appears in the search results and people having slow loading website will have worst experience. So, there is no surprise to know that the search giant still places value on site speed.

What actually slows down site speed?

Your speed problem may occur because of your site host and the uneven quality of service that comes with sharing a server. A good managed host is what you need to solve the litany of factors that could slow down your site.

Here is a list of issues, which you need to test

Widget or plug-in overload– There are various household names in this category such as hello bar and plug-in for killing site speed. To get the original Google+ buttons, Joshua Bixby was surprised by its downloading time of 2 seconds and it’s not just him, many others had the same reaction when they discovered such kind of issues. Since Google has fixed the problem, but it is clear that widget or plug-in will put some burden on site.
Too many ads– Today, slow loading ads is one of the major issues of high-bounce rates. Of course, once you have got a high level of traffic, then more ads are displayed on the site, also do not forget to weigh the cost of each additional ad.
Bloated images– Giant graphics and large images can surely grab the attention and pull the readers in but at the same time, downloading such images put a huge burden on speed.
Incompatible browsers and apps– Chrome and Shockwave Flash are such examples, for which you can blame Google as they don’t play nice, but it’s your responsibility to scan your site across such browsers.
Design Theme- Design theme is kind of paint job of the blog as it’s what makes people head turn, but in some cases, it’s what makes your site even slower.
Analytical code– To measure the performance of your site, that snippet of code, which you dropped across the site might slow down the speed of your site or you can say add milliseconds each time. For example- 100 milliseconds.
Sign up forms– Sub form’s back-end code such as Aweber or Google Feedburner might trip up your site’s speed as it can make additional calls to your SQL server.
Affiliate code– Another call to the server or another line of code is another factor to be considered while talking about the speed of your site.

Tools to test the site’s speed

Fortunately, there are some tools available for free in order to find out how to round up the above issues and to test how fast your site is. Being so fast and free, these tools are quite worth testing your site on every single tool to discover problems that have been missed out by any of the tools.p>

Page speed insights– A tool that is must to use for your site. To get an instant report or result of your site’s performance, all you need to do is drop your URL into the text box of this tools and click “submit”. Not just the report you will get, but a list of recommendations that will determine the high, medium or low priorities. The advantage of exploring experimental recommendations is what you will even get in this tool if you are the curious sort.
Google Analytics plug-in– A sweet Google Analytics plug-in is created that too includes site speed feature. A performance report presents to you, which determines how quickly or slowly your page loads across different browsers around the world.

Pingdom website speed test– Pingdom delivers some robust reports when you want to test individual page. Real-world conditions will be reflected in your results provided by this tool because the tests are performed on real browsers such as chrome.
YSlow– This tool is designed by Yahoo!, based on the rules for high-performance Testing your site on this tool provides you with a summary report that includes recommendations as well. Performance analysis tools offered such as JSLint is what makes them unique.
Load impact– Thousands of users hitting your site simultaneously are stimulated by this test. This might happens if you get a tweet from a celebrity. By having this tool by your side help you to spot the bottlenecks, and fix problems before real users land on your site.
P3 (Performance plug-in profiler) – You can have more than 21,000 plug-ins to choose from as each one add a cost. So, you have to make a smart choice. P3 will help you as it audits your plug-ins and discovers which ones are hogging bandwidth.

Conclusion

Building and increasing speed of your site run on few principles such as getting rid of what you don’t need, add new features through cost-benefit analysis, keep what you need, and ditch whatever you don’t need. Also, make sure that your site is running by the right hosting company and with the right software as well. A faster loading of the site is essential for helping potential customers interacting with your website.