Do you have any idea how fast your website loads on a desktop or mobile browser? Having a fast loading website is essential if you want your visitors to remain on your site for a longer period of time and not hit the back button. Why? Because the average time an online user spends on a website when browsing via their desktop or mobile phones is just in milliseconds!
It’s sad but it’s a reality in our present age. Today’s user has up to 5 pages opened on their browser at the same time. This means he has just a few minutes to flip between the whole 5 pages at a time.
Imagine a scenario when that visitor happens to visit your website for the very first time, and your site page loads like a crawling snail. If it were me, I would simply hit the back button, because I don’t have the whole time in the world to spare. That means the site has lost another valuable and potential prospect that would have turned into a long-term subscriber and possibly a customer.
So how do you detect how fast your site loads on a desktop or mobile browser? Simple, Google launched a lab called Page Speed Online that measures your site’s page speed on both desktop and mobile browsers, which gives your site a score of 1 to 100.
They don’t stop just there, they also give you advice on how to optimize your website for better speed load.
I gave them a try and my blog got a good score of 79 out of 100 page speed on a desktop from google. And a score of 75 out of 100 page speed on a mobile device as shown in the image below.
Cool huh? I guess this could be due to the kind of wordpress plugins I use in powering my blog.
They also gave me some advice on work that needed to be done in the range of high, medium and low priority. As shown below:
- High priority. These suggestions represent the largest potential performance wins for the least development effort. However, there are no high priority suggestions for this site. Good job!
- Medium priority. These suggestions may represent smaller wins or much more work to implement. You should address this item next:
Leverage browser caching - Low priority. These suggestions represent the smallest wins. You should only be concerned with these items after you’ve handled the higher-priority ones:
Specify a cache validator, Optimize images, Minify CSS, Specify a Vary: Accept-Encoding header - Rules without suggestions. There are no suggestions for these rules, since this page already follows these best practices. Good job!
Visit http://pagespeed.googlelabs.com today to learn more.
So tell me, did you measure your page load? What was your website page speed test score? Please share it with us in the comments box below. Join me on facebook.
