Is your website slow? You may have noticed your business website loading slowly, or suspect a high bounce rate could be a symptom. A slow loading time is a sure way to turn off clients, especially with slower Internet connections. In this article we discuss how to test website speed and identify where the biggest load time improvements can be made.

How to test website speed

The first thing to do is test your business website speed. There are many tools but a popular one is iwebtools website speed test which allows you to compare up to 10 urls. Before you plug your url into the speed test tool, gather your main competitors urls by Googling your target keywords. You will learn more by having this information for comparison. 

After you plug all the urls into the page speed checker, a list of the websites and load time information appears. A load time under 3 seconds is acceptable, but of course faster is better! The load time is the product of your website size (in kilobytes) and the average speed of the server connection.

Is your hosting company pulling their weight?

The average speed per kB is completely dependant on your hosting company. Because the server load may vary, try testing at a few different times through the day. Is your hosting company providing a speedy server connection, or is your average speed per kB consistently higher than your competitors? If it's the later, a change of hosting company can have a huge impact on website speed.

What if your website is a little overweight?

Is your website size comparatively large and making your website slow? Let's work out why! Google is very interested in helping speed up the web, and provide a great tool to test website speed. Visit the google page speed tool and enter your business website url. The result is a detailed website speed report, with suggestions for improved load times. They are organised into high, medium and low priority, addressing the high priority suggestions will give you the biggest website speed gains for the least effort.

Have you made changes to improve your website speed? Please share your thoughts and results with us...