Welcome back. This lesson is on page load speed issues. Page load speed is a ranking signal and has been since 2014. By making page load speed improvements you can vastly increase your overall website conversion as well. So page load speed is important for ranking, it impacts conversions, and it can put an unnecessary burden on your server's processing speed as well as the time it takes for users to download what they need. In this lesson, we'll cover common page speed test tools and the type of insights you might drive by looking at what they say about your website. You'll learn about what page load speed is and why it matters, the common tools that you can use to do page speed analysis, and how best to share these results with stakeholders or clients in a way that makes a difference. The speed at which your pages load is important, you should pay attention to this because it's inefficient to have a slow website. Imagine having a car or equipment that didn't operate at peak efficiency. You'd want to make a change, and it's the same here. Slow page load speed puts an unnecessary burden on server processing and user download time. It's also a ranking signal. Page load speed is accounted for when evaluating where one site should rank versus another, all other things being equal. This is done at the domain and page level. Perhaps most importantly, is the impact page speed has on conversion and user experience. When it takes too long to download or access a page, users may go to the competition or hit the back button on Google, and therefore not convert as intended on your site. There's quite a few page speed test tools on the market. I'll list them and go into more detail on a few. Google PageSpeed Insights gives you information on mobile and desktop performance. Yahoo YSlow does something very similar. There's another tool from Pingdom called the Speed Test. You can enter a URL, it will show you a waterfall report and page analysis and performance tips. A fourth tool is DareBoost which gives quality control and optimization indicators. Another platform is WebPagetest and the last is GTmetrix. These are all free tools, some require you to pay for additional features, they're accessible via their websites, and each could be used to provide more context to website performance. So let's talk about Google's PageSpeed Insights tool, it's perhaps the most commonly referenced. They separate out the analysis into performance on mobile and performance on desktop and then give you a score for each of those two platforms. It also makes recommendations, general and specific, on the kind of fixes that you could make to the site. GTmetrix is another great platform to consider. GTmetrix will show you page speed from Google, Yahoo YSlow, as well as waterfall chart of exactly every element on the page and its load time from start to finish. WebPagetest is an intriguing tool that will give you an even more detailed analysis of load time. It provides the time for the first image or source code information to render, how long it takes the document to be completely loaded and fully loaded. Completely loaded and fully are different in terms of what is visual of the user versus a completely uploaded page. One thing I like about WebPagetest is, it will allow you to identify page load speed issues in comparison with other websites. Your competitors for example. So you can look at one site and compare that to multiple others to have a better understanding of the load time for different types of sites. This is an easy way to get your team's attention by showing how you compare across your industry. Competition can be visually displayed to get the attention of those who can help you make changes and move the needle when it comes to page speed issues. Page load speed data can be overwhelming, there's a lot of information to process. The simplest way to think about how to make use of this is to provide the simple report. Take an export of one or two of the platforms that I've shared, three or four if you're interested, and categorize the impact and severity of the issue, then put that in the list and work at prioritizing it. For example, common issues include JavaScript render blocking, optimization of CSS, better browser caching, and minimizing or reducing the size of different elements. These common issues are true for most websites and then simplest way to get the attention of those whose help you need, is to do a competitive analysis, comparing your site against competing sites, provide specific instruction and ideally some understanding of the effort, action or impact required. For example, is this more severe or more of a middle or lower tier of the impact it has on the domain? By providing your report or analysis in this way to those needing to take action on the report, you can prioritize what your team should emphasize in terms of page load speed improvements.
