Speed, speed, speed. You’re probably sick and tired of us talking about how important it is to have a fast website. However, I’m going to say it again – YOU NEED TO HAVE A WEBSITE THAT LOADS FAST, and it all starts with a successful website design. If you want a few reasons why this is so important, take a look at the top section of our How To Speed Up Your Website In Less Than 24 Hours. Something dawned on us though. How are you supposed to know if your site is running slow or not, especially by Google’s standard’s, which is on the backend and something that the naked eye doesn’t see. A site that you or I thinks loads fine, could be deathly slow by Google standards. So, how do you know???? In order to answer the question, “how do I speed up my website”, you need to run a website speed test. Luckily, for people like you and me, there are an abundance of free tools available too provide insight into the speed and diagnose the problems, and then there’s digital media firms, like ohhhh I don’t know….. Reds Media ….. to help you correct those issues. Lets not get ahead of ourselves though. By our standards, following is a list of our favorite tools to determine if a website is loading at a favorable speed.

Google Developers PageSpeed Insights

The goal of having a fast website is to appear as high on the google ranks as possible – so it’s only natural we start with the Google PageSpeed tool. The results that are given can be relatively technical, but they give you great insight into how to optimize your site. You should aim to get a score higher than 80 with this test.

Website Grader Powered By Hubspot

If you are not familiar with Hubspot and their strategies, you need to start reading up. They are changing the way a sales and marketing organization goes about acquiring leads and they focus on providing as much value to the consumer as possible, which will then lead to them choosing to work with you. One of the greatest aspects of this website grader with Hubspot is the practicality of it. You should aim to score above a 90 on this test, and Hubspot will give you ways to improve your site that are not over the moon technical.

Pingdom

If you’re looking for a tool that will give you the speed of the site, and a boat load of additional information regarding why your score came out the way it did and how it compares to other scores, Pingdom is the best option for you. You should aim to score an “A” for an Pingdom’s performance grade. Similar to google, Pingdom’s recommendations have a tendency to be a bit technical and the chances are you will need to consult a professional to take corrective action.

WebPagetest

Old school, yet very reliable. WebPagetest gives your a number of ways to test the speed of your site. You can test strictly from a cell phone, you can test strictly from a desktop, and you can even choose to test from different browsers. This source is nice as well because it shows you a video of what your site looks like to an end user while it’s loading.

Conclusion

You can’t go wrong with any of these free tools for a website speed test, and at the very least, they will give you an idea of where you are currently at. You know what they say, you can’t determine the right way to get to where you want to go if you don’t know where you currently are at. The tricky part, however, will be digesting the diagnostic information and making the necessary corrections to get your website on the right track. That’s where we come in! Let us help you answer the question, “how do I speed up my website”.Please, contact us today, and schedule a free consultation. OR, sign up for a free website evaluation and let us do all this work for you!

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