5 Tools to Make Your Website Faster

Ever wondered if the loading speed of your website significantly affects the amount online traffic you have or if it can decrease your conversion rate?

According to trusted online gurus, your loading speed can have a big impact on your search engine ranking and can cause website visitors to flee if it takes more than 3 seconds.

To combat the negative effects a slow loading website can have on your revenue, we have compiled a list of 5 important tools that can boost the speed of your website.

1. GTmetrix

As stated by PWD, “Each visitor that leaves represents the loss of a potential sale”, so getting your audience to stay on your website for longer is vital. Website traffic that ups your bounce rate is almost always caused by a badly designed website or poor inaccessibility to the website itself.  If you are unsure whether the loading capabilities of your site are the main problem, you will need a tool that can accurately test your website’s speed.

GTmetrix can tell you exactly how fast your website loads, and it reports back on your YSlow score and PageSpeed. Furthermore, it compares your website’s overall performance with other websites which will present you with a competitive benchmark you can work towards.

By looking at your GTmetrix scores, you will begin to get an idea of where you can improve and further use this tool to monitor your progress until you are happy with your results.

2. Content Delivery Networks

Aside from investing in a reliable web hosting provider, using a content delivery network will help you to really increase your website’s performance.  A CDN allows online traffic to access your website by downloading content from global servers that are closest to them. This significantly increases your website’s loading speed which will boost your SERP rankings and lower your monthly hosting bill.

It also means that you won’t have to solely rely on radically changing the composition or content of your website but rather invest in an extra monthly service to get the job done. Although optimized images and videos are helpful, relying on more than one server to transport data will definitely remove some of the load off your hosting provider’s shoulders.

3.  Plugins to Optimize Images

As mentioned in the previous section, optimizing the images on your website can help reduce web page loading times by reducing strain put on hosting servers. A lot of website owners are reluctant to do this for fear of losing image quality. Luckily, there are a few content management system plugins solely created to prevent this from happening.

Plugins like WP Smush.it are compatible with WordPress and works by compressing images, thereby reducing their file size. If you are not using this particular CMS then you can also have a look at other online tools such as Tiny PNG and Kraken which effectively reduce picture colours without it being visible to the naked eye.

4. HTTP Compression Test

By compressing your content you can help devices running on slow internet connections to gain access to your content faster.  The URL Compression Test evaluates whether your server is sending compressed HTML, CSS, JavaScript and XML data to web users through enabled modules.

By using mod_deflate or mod_gzip for data compression you will also make it easier for your server to accommodate huge amounts of online traffic at the same time. This will increase your website loading speed by giving your server more space efficiency during data transferrals.

Furthermore, it will help you to reduce the size of your images which means you won’t need to invest in multiple tools to optimize your website.

5. Dotcom-Monitor

Knowing the overall speed and loading times of your website can be beneficial, but knowing how your website is fairing based on location can be even more helpful. Sometimes you want to target a certain region and therefore need to know your location-specific web performance score.

Dotcom-Monitor allows you to test your website’s loading speed from 20 locations around the world. It will give you a summary of your fastest and slowest elements and provide you with a detailed chart that breaks your speed down according to host element.

Furthermore, you can monitor your network connectivity through their ping test tool which will give insight into your network’s response time and allow you to easily diagnose errors.

With these 5 tools, you will be able to speed up your website in no time and enjoy higher conversion and SEO ratings. By allowing web browsers faster access to your content, you will also see faster online growth and provide a better user experience to all of your clients.