How to Host a Website on Google Cloud Platform
June 30, 2023
Checking how fast and well your WordPress website works might sound a bit tricky, but it’s not that hard when you have the right tools. Your website visitors want it to be super fast. If it’s not, they might leave and all the effort you put into making your site will be for nothing.
If you want people to like your website and for it to show up at the top on Google, you should try your best to make it load quickly and work well.
Here’s a quick story that’s most important in my job as a marketing consultant, and I tell it to all my clients.
A few years ago, I told my boss, the CEO, that we should check how well our online store works. He said it seemed fast on his computer, so he didn’t think we needed to test it. But that was a mistake because when you use your own website a lot, web browsers like Chrome save the stuff on it to make it load faster next time.
We explained to him that we could easily and for free test how well our website works with the right tools.
So, we did the test, and we found ways to make our website work better and give our customers a better shopping experience!
I bet you’re interested in finding out how well your website is doing, right? Well, stick around because we’re going to teach you how to check the speed of your WordPress site using some popular tools and explain what the numbers mean.
Top 5 Best Website Speed Test Tools
When you make a website and share it with people, you can’t make mistakes. But don’t fret, there are many tools available to check how fast your website loads. We’ve picked the 5 best ones to help you begin.
1. PageSpeed Insights (PSI)
PageSpeed Insights (PSI) is a tool made by Google. It checks your website and tells you how fast it works on different devices. It also gives you tips on how to make your website better on phones and computers.
It gathers information in two different places: one is inside a controlled space like a laboratory (we call this “lab data”), and the other is out in the real world (we call this “field data”). This helps you see how well your website is doing and make sure it works well online and in search engines like Google.
2. GTmetrix
GTmetrix is like a tool that checks your website to see how fast it is and suggests ways to make it faster.
The statistics it generates are incredibly useful to monitor when your pages are slow, and when you track them over time you get some really interesting patterns that can help you optimize how your site is running.
3. Pingdom
Pingdom makes it simple and cheap to keep an eye on how well your website is doing online. It helps you see if your site is up and running, how fast it loads, and if there are any problems. This way, you can fix any issues that might be causing trouble for your website.
They have two ways to check how your website is doing. One way pretends to be a visitor and sees how things work. The other way checks what real visitors are experiencing. Pingdom gives you a score for how well your website is doing, tells you how long it takes for your pages to load, how big your pages are, and how many times your website gets requested by visitors.
4. WebPageTest
WebPageTest lets you check how fast your website loads for people all over the world. It also shows you how your site performs on different web browsers and at speeds that most of your website visitors have. And the best part? It’s completely free!
Once it’s gathered those results, it can make various suggestions to help optimize how your site is running and what you can do to improve things. The specificity you can include when it comes to geography makes this a really interesting and powerful tool.
5. Yslow
YSlow is like a helpful tool for websites. It checks how fast and good a website is. It might not look fancy, but it has lots of smart people helping it get better. It can help find some hidden problems on your website.
Here’s how YSlow works: It looks at your website and checks it against a list of 23 rules. These rules are like guidelines for making websites work really well. YSlow gives your website a grade, like in school (from A to F), and you can see this grade using GTMetrix.
So, here’s the deal! The scores for how well your website performs can be different because different tools use different methods and setups. You can use two of these tools, for instance, and compare their results.
Google PSI (PageSpeed Insights) is a tool that helps you make your website better for users, which can improve your ranking on Google. Even though the tools don’t give exactly the same results, I still recommend using PSI to test your website. This way, your site will be ready for the changes Google is making to its algorithm.
If you want to improve your website’s performance, contact Silver Hamster today. They can help you make your site faster and more efficient. And with that, you’ll be all set to succeed online!
So, make your website fast and efficient, and you’ll be on the right track!
