The loading speed of a web page is a key factor for search engine positioning as it may affect it according to the Google’s search algorithm, since it improves indexability, bounce rate, and conversion rate as well. Below the details are mention little more.

Why loading time influences the indexability of your website?

Search engine spiders devote a limited time to track and index each website, because their resources and time are limited. For this reason, the shorter the loading time of our website, the more pages can track search engine robots. This may not affect small websites, but it does have great relevance in large portals or that generate a lot of content, since spiders may not have time to track all the new generated pages.

The higher the page load speed, the lower the bounce rate

There are several studies in which it indicates that a person is willing to wait until a page finishes loading or how the loading speed affects the behavior of the visitor. From them you can deduce the following:

• The speed of loading is a determining factor in the rate of abandonment of a website.
• Mobile visitors only wait between 6 and 10 seconds (or less) for the web to load before leaving it and go to the competition.
• 73% of mobile users say that they have found many websites that are slow on mobile.

How does the performance of a website affect the conversion?

Several companies are dedicated towards the serving of content such as Akamai or Amazon have conducted studies that analyze how the performance of a website affects online stores and Kiss Metris collects it in this infographic of which we can point out:

• About 50% of online store buyers expect the web to load in 2 seconds or less.
• The 40% of visitors leave the shop if it takes more than 3 seconds to load.
• 79% of users who were not happy with the performance of the web have very little chance of buying in it.
• Tools to measure the loading time of a web

There are several tools to measure the performance of a web page, some more basic and others more complete. Currently, the most used are

• WebPageTest.org
• GTMetrix
• Pingdom
• PageSpeed Insights

These tools provide us with information about downloaded resources, their weight and web page load times, the headers that are sent and tips to improve the loading speed of the page.

WebPageTest.org

This is the best tool for testing the page speed of any website and you can run this free website speed test. You can also have multiple locations to test real results of the page speed by other areas of the world and you can select mobile and desktop browsers with versions of Google Chrome. They will provide you the accurate results of page speed optimizations.

GT Metrix

GT Metrix is also considered as the best tool for page speed optimization as it will provide you the insight reports of the website and will also give you a recommendation of optimizing the page speed. Its recommendations allow you to see various errors, load times, TTFB (time to first byte) contentful paint, and other measures of page speed.

Pingdom

It is the most cost-effective tool which assures the testing of the website in more convenient way. It will monitor the performance of your websites from resources including ads, third-party javascript, and unoptimized images. They have more than 70 global polling locations. With Pingdom you can experience the performance and better user experience.

The website also reports website page speed through their analysis of the page speed as well as optimization factors to speed up a single URL. It is the easiest tool for webmasters to understand.

Google PageSpeed Insights

PageSpeed Insights is integrated right into Google Analytics and provides tabs for both mobile and desktop devices. This is probably the most thorough reporting tool for issues including, but not limited to:

• render blocking javascript and CSS
• GZIP Compression
• minimized CSS and Javascript
• unoptimized images

PageSpeed Insights breaks also lists the good page performance score is recommended to 80 or above, but for lower scores, the scale measures as follows:

• medium page performance score is 60 to 79
• low page performance score is 0 and 59

The higher the score, the faster your webpage and the better it performs.

Improve web page load speed

Another way to see the loading time of our website is in the developer tools of the Google Chrome browser. To see the tools press the F12 key and go to the “Network” tab. If you reload the page, you can see the download flow of all the elements and the time it takes for each resource to load.

Factors that affect the loading speed of a page

To load a web page, depending on the particular web browser, a series of requests similar to this order:

• Request to the DNS server to resolve the IP address of the server where our website is hosted
• The connection of the visitor’s browser with the server where the web page is located
• Processing of the page on the server and sending the resulting HTML back to the visitor’s browser.
• The browser reads the HTML that arrives from the server and searches all external resources (images, scripts, fonts, videos) and asks them to the server. From there, it builds the DOM (Document Object Model)
• The browser will render the page by parsing the DOM as it downloads the HTML and external resources.

Due to the number of requests that are made, an important factor in the load time is the internet speed that the visitor has, but minimizing the number of resources downloaded can improve page speed time.