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How to Check My Website Speed and Issue?

By  //  June 25, 2023

The speed of a website plays a crucial role in shaping the user experience and affects search engine optimization (SEO) rankings. A slow-loading website is likely to frustrate visitors, leading to a higher bounce rate and a loss in potential conversions.

This article will provide a comprehensive guide on how to check and improve your website’s speed.

Website Speed – Basic

Website speed refers to how quickly webpages are loaded on a user’s browser. Factors influencing this include the website’s server, page file size, the number and size of images, CSS and JavaScript files, as well as network issues. Slow website speed can significantly impact traffic and conversions, given users’ growing expectations for instant information access.

How to Test Your Website Speed

There are numerous tools available that help to measure website speed, such as Google PageSpeed Insights, HostTracker, and WebPageTest. These tools provide a breakdown of your website’s performance and offer specific recommendations for improvement.

  1. Google PageSpeed Insights: Provides performance reports for both mobile and desktop devices, along with suggestions for optimization.
  2. HostTracker: Monitors website availability and performance from a network of servers worldwide, offering insights into server response times.
  3. WebPageTest: Allows detailed performance tests and provides granular data about every element of your website.

Interpreting results from these tools often requires a basic understanding of web development, including aspects such as load times, render-blocking resources, and time to interact.

Identifying Website Issues via HostTracker

HostTracker provides a comprehensive report detailing various elements impacting website performance. Here are some common issues to look out for:

  1. Large and uncompressed images: Images constitute a significant portion of your website’s data size. Large, uncompressed images can drastically slow down your site. HostTracker can indicate if large images are bogging down your website.
  2. Unoptimized CSS and JavaScript: HostTracker analyzes your CSS and JavaScript files. If they are unoptimized, it can lead to slower loading times. Large, unnecessary, or poorly structured code can delay rendering of your web pages.
  3. Excessive HTTP requests: Every piece of your site (images, scripts, stylesheets) requires a separate HTTP request. More requests mean more time for the page to load fully. HostTracker can help identify if your site is making excessive HTTP requests.
  4. Poor server response time: The server response time or Time to First Byte (TTFB) is the time it takes for a user’s browser to receive the first byte of page content. If HostTracker reports a long TTFB, your server may be the issue.
  5. Bad Traceroute: Traceroute is a network diagnostic tool used to track the pathway taken by a packet on an IP network from source to destination. You can perform real-time traceroute online analysis with a host-tracker tool to trace the path and diagnose network issues to confirm or deny this problem. A ‘bad’ Traceroute could signify network issues, such as routing loops or packet loss, which could impede website speed.

With the help of the automated monitoring service of HostTracker, you can check not only your site, but also the resources of competitors. You can even obtain detailed information about a domain owner using host-tracker whois domain owner lookup to track critical competitor metrics.

How to Fix Common Website Speed Issues

Addressing the above issues can improve your website’s speed:

  1. Images: Use tools to compress images without losing quality and apply responsive image techniques.
  2. CSS and JavaScript: Minify and combine files where possible, and defer non-critical JavaScript.
  3. HTTP Requests: Simplify your design to reduce requests, use CSS instead of images where possible, and combine multiple scripts or stylesheets into one.
  4. Server Response Time: Improve your server response time by optimizing your web server software or configuration, upgrading your hardware, or even changing your web hosting solution if necessary.

Advanced Techniques for Boosting Website Speed

Content Delivery Networks or CDNs are a network of servers distributed across different locations globally. These servers store copies of your website’s static content, such as images, CSS, and JavaScript files. When a user visits your site, the CDN serves them the content from the closest server. This decreases the distance the data has to travel, leading to faster loading times, particularly for users far away from your primary server.

Caching is a technique where frequently accessed data is stored temporarily in high-speed storage systems. This allows for the quick delivery of data upon request. On a website, caching can occur at various levels, including browser caching, page caching, and object caching. Caching reduces the number of requests sent to the server, thus decreasing server load and improving website speed.

HTTP/2 is the latest version of HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol). It introduces several features that can improve website speed. Key features include multiplexing, which allows multiple requests and responses to be sent simultaneously, and server push, which permits servers to send resources the browser didn’t yet request but will likely need. These features can lead to significant improvements in website load time.

Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) is an open-source project aimed at making mobile web pages load faster. AMP achieves this by creating a stripped-down version of a web page, allowing it to load almost instantly on mobile devices. While AMP has its limitations, including restrictions on certain HTML tags and CSS, it can drastically improve the speed of mobile pages, thereby enhancing user experience and potentially boosting SEO performance.

Regular Monitoring and Optimization

Website speed isn’t a ‘set and forgets‘ component of your site; it’s a metric that requires consistent monitoring and optimization. Regular monitoring is important for various reasons. First, websites are dynamic, with new content and features being added over time, which can affect speed. Second, user expectations and industry standards evolve rapidly. A site considered fast a year ago might be deemed slow today. Regular monitoring can also help detect and fix speed-related issues before they start to impact the user experience or SEO.

Website optimization services are professional services aimed at improving website speed and overall performance. They employ a range of strategies, from code optimization to image compression and server configuration, depending on the unique needs of your website.

Some companies also offer ongoing monitoring and optimization services, ensuring your site continues to perform optimally. Examples of such services include Rigor, Akamai, and Cloudflare’s performance services.

These services can be a great asset, especially for larger websites or those without a dedicated in-house web performance team.

Case Study: Improving Website Speed

This section can include a case study of a real-life website speed improvement project, outlining the issues identified, the steps taken to resolve them, the tools used, and the results achieved in terms of website speed and user experience improvement.

Conclusion

In conclusion, website speed is crucial for user experience and SEO. Regular monitoring and optimization can ensure a fast, smooth browsing experience for all users. By identifying potential.