Learn how to make sure your site is up to speed!
Video Transcript
Welcome back to another Wednesday Workshop from DealerOn. We hope you are staying safe and healthy.
As many of us are either quarantined or sheltering in place, we’re turning to the internet to keep us from climbing the walls.
This puts additional strain on our nation’s digital infrastructure. Sites that used to load quickly are slow, and slow sites are basically unreachable. That means it’s time to check your site’s loading speed.
You should already know how important your site’s loading speed is. If not, here’s the short version: a site’s speed is important to Google’s algorithm, so slower sites are ranked lower than faster ones. In addition, the longer your site takes to load, the more people will decide it’s not worth it and bounce.
Here’s the good news. You can get the ball rolling for free.
A number of sites will let you test yours for free. Hope they’re loading quickly these days.
Google can check your speed with PageSpeed Insights, and since they’re the ones with the algorithm, might as well start there.
Link: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
Since over half of all web traffic is done on mobile phones, it makes sense to check your site on those devices as well. Google has a page specifically for testing the mobile speed.
Link: https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/feature/testmysite/
A lot of users prefer the way the information is presented over on Pingdom. It’s going to be the same or nearly the same information.
Link: https://tools.pingdom.com/
It also wouldn’t hurt to get super low-tech with this. You’re stuck inside, but you have the perfect excuse to call friends or family. Ask them to load your site, after of course seeing how they are, and talking about the weather. It’s not going to be exact, but it will give you an idea of what the additional strain on that digital infrastructure is doing to you.
Now is the time to start deciding what you really need on your site. Remove a single element, then test the site again. Put it back, remove another, test again. You finally have the time, and when this is over, your site will be humming along at highway speeds. Your providers are all equipped to help you with this testing, so just ask.
That’s all the time we have for today’s workshop.
As always, if you have any questions or comments, leave them below and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can.
Thanks for watching.
We’ll see you next week for another Wednesday Workshop from DealerOn.
