One of the top things we want as bloggers and webmasters is to take our sites or articles to position #1 of page 1 of main search engines. Now, a lot is written out there on improving ones SERP position and one of the things that are under looked is the load speed of your blogs.
There are a lot of factors that affect your blog’s load speed and quickly, some of these are your web host, your theme, the plugins you have, images on your blog, etc. The crucial question in this post is to find out your blog speed so I will be focusing on tools that will help analyze your site performance and make recommendations for improvement. The reason is that Google has over 200 signals to determine search rankings and site speed is one of these. You therefore can’t afford to pay less attention to it.
Anything over 2 seconds could be considered slow. I have written a post on my blog where I show how I brought down my blog loading time from 10+ seconds to 3 seconds in just one day. While this sounds remarkable, my objective is to go below 2 seconds. This is the article.
Now, you cannot base your site speed judgment on your local network speed. For some of us in areas of slow connectivity, it may take over a minute or two to get the complete page load. Our concern here is how much time the server takes to interpret and process the command and deliver the page to the client, all things being equal. In any case, let’s see how to know your blog speed and performance level.
How do I know the site speed and performance grade of my blog?
Here are a few tools that can help know the site speed of your blog, with some suggestions how to get things fixed
Google Page Speed
This is the very first tool I recommend. It evaluates the
QuickSprout
This is an interesting tool by Neil Patel and according to him, it’s taking him over $100 000 to put this in place. If you want my opinion, this is going to be one top speed test tools in 2014. It tests your site performance, gathers a lot of information and makes recommendations for improvements. Find out more about this tool here
Gtmetrix
This is another player that analyses the performance of your blog and makes suggestions for improvement. This tool combines materials from Page speed and Yslow. Go test your site here
YSlow
This is a free tool from yahoo that analyses and suggests ways to improve website speed based on a set of rules for high performance web pages. This comes as a plugin for Chrome,Firefox, Opera, Safari. Go here to find out more about it.
I’m aware there are a handle full of speed and performance test tools out there. These 3 are my top recommendations for you.
The accuracy of these tools may not be 100% but it goes a long way to give you a clearer view on your site performance.
When Google ranks slow sites, people use Google less. That’s a logical point to understand why speed is a ranking factor. However, it’s important to note that relevance still holds more weight in ranking your post.
While you may want to check this article on my blog on how to speed up your blog, kindly share your thoughts in the comment box below.
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