If you never test your website’s performance, you’ll never know how to deal with problems when they arise, what kinds of issues to expect or whether users are able to navigate effectively. Testing is crucial for any business website. The very good news is that there are plenty of free tools out there that allow you to do most of the tasks yourself at a very low cost without the need to hire out and add to the bottom line.
What Is Testing All About?
Testing is the only way to see how websites respond and behave during times of high traffic, outages, low or no traffic and in instances when the online environment is unstable. It’s important to know exactly how your pages will handle large numbers of visitors. Will shopping carts perform as well with 1,000 as with five customers? Can your contact forms admirably accept hundreds of inquiries per minute? Unless you’ve tested under these specific conditions, you simply will be left wondering.
Why Speed Matters So Much
Companies with quick-loading websites enjoy higher traffic rates than slow, sticky webpages. Not only do rapid fill times mean more visitors, those visitors translate into higher revenues, higher rankings in Google search and happier customers. Achieving high search ranking is the beginning of the revenue cycle for many retailers. But how to rank high, besides working on the velocity side of the equation? Page rank is closely related to having relevant content that offers value to readers. There’s also the matter of using keywords in the right way and publishing content on a regular, frequent basis.
Testing
In order to see exactly how quickly your pages load, you’ll need a website speed analysis Tool by Pingdom. There are dozens of them you can find online, all for free. Most of the major search engines offer their own versions that are both reliable and easy to use. It seems you can’t read an article in a tech publication these days without bumping into at least 10 pieces on the topic of speed testing and why it’s so darn essential. When you run an acceleration test, you find out extremely important things, like how long it takes each page on your site to load, how your website compares to your competitors’ in terms of loading time. It’s often said that a loading delay of just one or two seconds can mean a major loss of traffic, customers and revenue.
How to Boost Your Site
There are lots of ways to ramp up a website’s pace. A common problem for many small and medium-sized companies is image size. It’s tempting to load up various pages with beautiful photos that relate to your key products and services. The problem is that the Internet doesn’t handle high-density images very well or very quickly. Trim down your photo sizes, try to use JPEG for PNG format if possible, and avoid rich colors. By opting for fewer, and smaller images, you’ll likely see every page loading much faster than before.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.