When it comes to creating a great website for your business, there are a lot of things to consider. You have to consider the overall design, content, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and a ton of other factors. But what’s most important is your website performance and the performance testing tools that determine whether your website is a winner.
Why is website performance the most important thing? Well, it turns out customers will wait no more than 3 seconds for a web page to load before abandoning a site. Just a half a second difference in load time can make a 10% difference in sales for an online retailer.
So it’s super important to invest in website performance testing tools and figure out how to improve your web performance.
What is Website Performance Testing?
In short, website performance testing shows us how a website behaves and responds during various situations. It helps us test the speed and stability of your website systems.
Importance of Page Speed
In today’s technological world, customers expect fast and reliable online user experiences from every website. If you make them wait for your page to load, they’ll most likely visit a competitor’s website instead. They have limited time to wait for your website to load.
Website performance is incredibly important because customers generally think load times are slower than they actually are. This means you need to be doing all you can to make your website load as fast as possible. The fact is 46% of shoppers say they’ll never return to a slow website, so you need to keep them happy by using website performance testing tools.
Importance of Stability
There will be times when your website has more traffic than normal, and you want to make sure your server can handle the speed and volume of customers. You should know how many customers your website can handle until it breaks. That way you can implement the software and website updates necessary to deal with these issues.
Benefits of Website Performance Optimization
Not sold on website performance testing tools? Here are some benefits of a faster website:
Improved Search Rankings
Today, Google takes load time into account when ranking websites, so speed is an important issue. Improving your load time is an easy way to help customers get where they’re trying to go faster. Having a high Google ranking will also help you get more traffic from Google, which means you’ll have even more customers coming your way.
Here are some tips for increasing the ranking of your website on Google:
- Publish on a regular basis
- Use keywords effectively
- Make sure your content is relevant & valuable
- Use metadata correctly
- Use alternative text descriptions
Happier Customers & Higher Sales
As mentioned above, customers hate having to wait for websites to load. Even a one-second delay can decrease customer satisfaction by 16%. By combining a visually appealing website and website speed, you can keep customers happy and engaged, which will lead to increased sales and conversions.
Fact: Page load time can be impacted by a variety of factors like image size, code, and videos!
How to Start Monitoring Website Performance
Google Analytics can help you monitor your page load times across devices, locations, and operating systems. Their Speed Testing tool also makes it easy to see how your site is performing, and it’ll provide suggestions for ways to improve your load time.
How to Speed up Your Website
Here are some handy tips for increasing the speed of your website.
Check Your Browser Speed
The first thing you should do is see how your website loads across browsers, such as Google Chrome and Safari. If one browser is performing worse than the others, that’s a sign of a design issue, which you can easily fix!
Optimize Your Images
It’s possible your website is performing slowly because you’re using too many or too large of images. Optimize your website speed by ensuring your images are the right size and in the correct format.
Here are some tips for that:
- Crop your images to the right side
- Reduce color depth to the lowest acceptable level
- Use JPEG first, and PNG as a second option
Acertara is a great example of a website that uses images in an effective way.
Test on Multiple Screen Sizes
How does your website look on a desktop monitor versus a smartphone? Is your website designed responsively, or is it difficult for mobile users to engage with? You should know these things, and if possible, make your website responsive so you rank higher.
Make Your Code Compact
Want to speed up your site? Remove any unnecessary spaces, line breaks, and indentations in your code. There are many plugins and add-ons that can help you reduce all the code on your website.
Use Browser Caching
Browser caching saves some files in the user’s browser to make moving around the site faster and easier. This way the browser doesn’t have to download things like images every time the customer visits. By doing this, you can quickly speed up your site and optimize performance.
Use Both Manual and Automated Website Testing
Manual and automated testing are complementary ways to ensure your website is performing properly. There are many free automated testing options out there for you to use, so there’s no excuse not to.
List of Performance Testing Tools
If you follow the tips above, you’ll be able to start optimizing your website for greater speed. But we also thought we’d share a list of free and easy performance testing tools for you to use in case you need them:
- WebLOAD
- LoadUI NG Pro
- LoadView
- SmartMeter.io
- AppLoader
- Apache JMeter
- LoadRunner
- Appvance
- NeoLoad
- LoadComplete
- WAPT
- Loadster
Final Thoughts
Improving your website performance is essential for keeping customers happy and driving business growth. If you follow these quick and easy tips, you’ll have a bigger and better website in no time. And before we forget, if your website ever goes down, we recommend you connect with an expert to get it up and running again.
Know any performance testing tools we forgot to include? Let us know in the comments!
