Is your site fast on all devices? Google has stated in the era of mobile search, that how fast a site loads is an important ranking factor. What that means is, all things being equal for several sites that come up in a Google search, that Google will prefer a site which loads faster, especially on smart phones.

How to check how fast your site is

These are the two most widely used tools to measure speed, grade your site as well point out some of the techinical issues that you may not have known is wrong under the hood of your website.

Pingdom’s Website Speed Test
https://tools.pingdom.com/
Be sure to select the city closest to you in the “test from” drop down, then “Start Test” to see how your site does.

Google’s PageSpeed Insights
https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
This tool shows how well your site is graded on both mobile devices and desktop while also showing potential errors and fixes.

Common problems that affect website speed

• Too many images, or uncompressed large images. There are services and plugins that are available to help compress images greatly to save on the total amount of bandwidth that is used while your site loads.
• Too many script files like javascript and css files which often are used to control functions and appearance. In modern content management systems such as WordPress, these files can get quite numerous and can bog down speed. Minification can be used to combine scripts and reduce the total number of files loading.
• Not using various types of caching such as browser caching and content delivery networks. The idea is that files and items on your site can be stored in such a way that allows for them to be loaded faster.

The bottom line is that in this age of mobile the faster your site loads, the better it is for your site visitors and rankings. Let us help you fix common speed issues to help improve your rankings.