How to Test & Improve Site Speed
December 17, 2013 - David Hall
Category: SEO
Google’s announcement a few months back that above the fold content should load in under one second was reinforced by the release of their Page Speed Insights tool. Not only have they provided this free tool, but they’ve also made it available through your google analytics interface. This site provides a report analyzing your load times and ranks each page on a score of 0 to 100 to give you an idea of where that page stands. It also includes a “show how to fix” link which, as you would imagine, gives you pointers on removing issues that slow your site down. Another nice feature of the google tool is that you will get separate results for mobile and desktop tests.
Other great tools out there include webpagetest.org and my favorite pingdom.com/tools. Just enter your URL at any of these sites and you’ll get a pretty clear idea of how long it takes your site to show up on someone’s computer. While these resources give you specifics on your exact load times for your page and all their dependencies they do not measure above the fold load times. Rather, they will give you the big picture of your overall page in microsecond detail.
Above you can see how the data these tests return is broken down by file and displays the load time and size of every file loaded with your page. Furthermore, it shows us the order in which the files were loaded. This is important to us for a number of reasons. Typically many of these dependent files are not necessary to render your page and can be loaded after the above the fold rendering is complete.
So while Google’s page insights tool simply tells you which files are blocking the rendering of your above the fold content and gives you a few tips on how to fix the issue we often find that correcting those issues doesn’t actually improve your load time. With the precise times provided by other testing tools we can decide for ourselves what we really need in the header, and what we should load later.
So some serious speed testing has told you that your site invokes memories of the dial up era…now what?
New HTML5 attributes are specifically designed to help with these tasks and there are several javacript loaders out there to help you manage your load dependencies.