Video Transcript:
Hey, this is Al from Useractiv, and today I want to talk about website performance. First of all, why website performance is important, what you can do to check your website performance and how to see what the issues are coming up on the performance reports and how to start fixing them. So why is website performance in porn… First of all, it goes back to usability, your users, the people that visit your website, they don’t really… And I don’t think… Anybody has the patience to wait 30 seconds for a website to load. It’s not 1995 anymore, everybody’s got high-speed internet, so they’re expecting the page to load quickly, so performance is an issue because if somebody is waiting for a long time, they’re going to lose patience and they’re going to hit the back button or they’re going to go somewhere else. So it turns out that people usually on average, are willing to wait up to eight seconds, I’d say it’s probably a lot less than that, somewhere between three to four seconds, if you don’t see something happening on the web page and a fair amount of information coming up, then you probably think it’s broken and you hit the back button and you go somewhere else.
As far as why it’s important to have a fast loading website, also because of SEO and for Google search engine optimization purposes, because Google’s actual customers, besides being the people that they sell ads to, are the people that use their search engine, and they don’t want to have a bad user experience for the people that use their search engine. So imagine you’re searching for a particular phrase and you see this search engine results page, and you click on a link, but that page doesn’t perform well.
Google checks all the pages that they link out to and if they are performing well and if they don’t load it quickly, then they get dropped as far as the ranking, so you want to make sure if you want to keep those rankings for your website and those keyword rankings that your page is performing well.
Let’s get into how to go ahead and check what your website performance is, there are several tools and the three most common that are Google PageSpeed Insights, HubSpot Website Grader, and GTMetrix, as far as being able to test how fast your page loads…
So let’s start off with Google’s PageSpeed Insights. So I’m going to use my website, useractiv.com to see how that comes up as far as a performance report, so I’m going to go ahead and analyze that and… While that’s going, because it takes a little bit of time. I’m going to get HubSpot going as well, and I’ll get GTMetrix going as well. That’s somewhere between 30 seconds to a minute for this scan to run and for you to get your performance report. So let’s give it a little bit of time.
So as you could see here in Google’s PageSpeed insights, this is on the mobile tab. Well, it’s important that you check for mobile and for desktop. So I’m going to do for desktop just today, and it’s giving me an idea as far as performance on a desktop, so everything looks good, everything is green and looks like the page is coming up quickly, and it’s given me some suggestions or opportunities, and it’s telling me to properly optimize images.
This is probably one of the best things that you could do to improve your page speed performance. A lot of the times when you get images from your designer or your designer creates images for your website, they don’t take into account how big the image files are. Everything that’s on a web page has to be pulled in from different files on the website and that all has to be loaded and downloaded, and if you have these oversized images as far as files, it’s going to blost your website and it’s going to make it bigger than it has to be, so that’s one of the quickest fixes, is to go ahead and optimize your images, make them as small as possible, but still high quality.
You have to gauge it and see if it’s worth doing because right now it’s telling me to .72 seconds. I don’t think that there’s much I can do there. I can maybe trim a quarter of a second at most, or maybe some file size, but that’s one of the decisions that you have to make, is it worth doing and what’s going to create the most amount or rewards? So let’s take a look at HubSpot. HubSpot is giving me in 83, which is okay. And some of the issues that I’m seeing here are performance and security, so if I go into the performance section, a tone, there’s room for improvement as far as page requests, and it’s telling me the more HTTP request your website makes, the slower it becomes.
Try to reduce the number of files your site loads, and by files, they mean JavaScript files, CSS files, image files. Your browser has to call all these for your page to render correctly, JavaScript for functionality or interactivity, CSS for the way your page looks or style. The best way to do this is to go ahead and combine some of those into one file if you have many files and also to minimize of these files and by minimizing, they mean…
When you have a website or you have code for a website like CSS, there are a bunch of spaces, and all this does by minimizing is it compresses it, so there are no spaces and you save some amount of space as far as file size, but not a whole ton, unless you have a lot of different files that you’re loading in.
So sets giving me the suggestion for minimizing because I’m not using it, sometimes it’s good to use it on… As I said, how many files are you using? And then let’s go into the security, and the biggest issue here is going to be HTTPS, and I could tell you that probably the biggest issue there is going to be that maybe I’m not linking to some of these images using HTTPS because when you call them… You call the image URL and then you want to have HTTPS for all your calls, so in every file that it’s calling in image files, a JavaScript file, that data is being encrypted as it’s being called and delivered to your browser and your computer because that’s what you really want to keep safe. Okay, so the next one that we want to go into is GTMetrix.
It’s kind of giving me an error here, let’s try it again, and see if this works. And you could see that the test server location is in Vancouver, Florida…
I’m sorry, Vancouver, Canada. So that’s not so close to where I’m at in Florida, so the closer this testing server is to where you actually are, where your ISP internet service provider is, the faster you’re going to be able to check that, so that doesn’t appear to be working on my site for the moment… So I’m going to check out another website to see how that does, so you could take a look at the kind of metrics that they come up with on their report.
So again, it’s testing from a server location from Vancouver, Canada, that’s bringing up the page image and generating a report, and it’s giving this web page a 99% performance. So the summary is giving some suggestions here where you might be able to save say 150K and let’s look at performance. First content full paint, 262 milliseconds being indexed in 681 milliseconds. And if you hover over some of these question marks, it’ll give you more of an explanation as to what this means and what a good benchmark is, so you hear it saying that .9 seconds or less. We’re way below that. We’re a .26 speed index. We’re looking good.
The largest content paint, that’s the biggest part of the content and how long that takes to load, it takes less than a second, as long as you get the big things out of the way quickly, everything else should load up pretty fast. Let’s compare that to page speed insights, it’s telling me my first content paint is .07. The largest content paint is one second. So let’s compare that.
There’s a difference here. So why am I highlighting the difference between the two and is that it’s not an exact science, it’s more or less an estimation because again, you’re using different servers, this is using Vancouver. Google might be using other servers in California or somewhere closer, if you’re testing and this is the same thing when you’re visiting a website, because that website might be visited, might be hosted on a server somewhere in Denver, and there are different web hosts all over the place.
So you’re trying to access computers and are all over the world, and your load time is going to be different depending on what type of information you’re loading, how much and where that information is stored on the web server somewhere, so that’s why it’s important to use these three different services, so that you could get a good gauge and kind of average things out, and what I suggest is to look at whatever is a red flag that they show, and as long as all three of them show good performance numbers, depending on the location of the servers, then you should be good.
So I hope that helped. I hope that you’re able to now go out there and optimize your website or take a look at some of the metrics using some of these websites, I’ll put the links to those inside of the description. And if you like this video, please hit the Like button and subscribe for more videos that can help you improve your website so you could gender more, generate more leads and more sales for your business. If you need help with optimizing your website and proving your metrics, or revamping your website with better copy, better graphics or a complete website refresh, please reach out to us at Useractiv, that’s what we do all the time, we’re a website design and development company and an optimization company, we’re all about making great websites that serve your customers and help your business grow. Thanks!