Speed test – How fast must your blog load?

Run a speed test to check your blog Load speed. The recommended best load speed is from 2 – 5 seconds. Preferably under 2.5 seconds for mobile. A speed test is of paramount importance. Because site speed plays a direct role in user experience. Especially with handheld devices where extremely large file images will take forever to load. Site speed has been indicated as one of the signals used by Google algorithms to rank pages. Therefore, the Google speed update will impact your site ranking capability. Keep reading to the end and access all these free tools. To boost your site ranking capability.

Page speed has been a ranking factor since 2009! But never on mobile at the time. Starting in 2018. Page speed will be a major ranking factor for handheld devices. From mobile phones to laptops. Mac and iPads. Which is why your blog must also be optimized for best mobile display. You can test your site mobile load time with “Test My Site”, another great tool by Google.

Increasing site speed makes for much better user experience. Which in turn may lead to a lower bounce rate. But it can also increase the site popularity or Alexa rank. Especially when you are active on your blog. Consistently posting, designing and optimizing. You should run a speed test at least once per week. Simply visit the Chrome Web Store and search for the keyword Alexa.

Pingdom offers cost-effective and reliable up-time and performance monitoring for your website. We use more than 70 global polling locations to test and verify our customers’ websites 24/7, all year long. 

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Important extensions for SEO and keywords.

Using the “Alexa Traffic Rank” Chrome and Firefox extension. Is a simple way to run a site speed test. Once installed this will show the Alexa traffic rank. Country traffic rank with search analysis and similar sites. Also, most importantly the site load speed. This blog is currently loading in 3.608 seconds. But it’s still considered slow by Alexa.

But while you’re in the Chrome web store. You may want to check out a few SEO extensions I use. SEO Quake – Keywords Everywhere – Measure SEO – Keyword Density. While you cannot run a site speed test with these. You can however get a lot of SEO keyword information. Which is equally important for a site to rank in search engines.

Bear in mind that these are all free tools. Extensions and plugins. All it requires is for you to sacrifice the time and use these tools.

Simple WordPress site plugins to load faster.

Getting a better speed test result can also be improved with WordPress plugins. You may want to install the “W3 Super Cache”. Just follow the steps to activate and configure. This plugin improves search engine result page rankings. Especially for mobile-friendly websites and sites that use SSL (https protocol). It offers Optimized progressive render.

Which means ages will start rendering quicker. Therefore, can be interacted with more quickly for increased user experience. There is also up to 80% bandwidth savings. With HTTP compression of HTML. CSS and JavaScript along with feeds.

Run a free website speed test from multiple locations around the globe using real browsers (IE and Chrome) and at real consumer connection speeds. You can run simple tests or perform advanced testing including multi-step transactions, video capture, content blocking and much more. 

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Easy WordPress settings for better speed test results.

But there are also some setting changes to increase the load time of your blog. For a better speed test result and popularity boost in Alexa. Easily done through customizing the theme you use. Simply go to “appearance” from inside the WordPress C-Panel. Then go to “customize” in the drop-down menu.  “Setup and Layout” should offer the option to add a site icon (aka favicon). Add one preferably JPG and 256 x 256 pixels. Not having a logo will result in error pages for your blog structured data results in Google. Site layout can be set to “stretched”. While max site width may be decreased from 1380 pixels wide to 1080 pixels.

You can test your site structured data results in google with the Google Structured Data Testing Tool. Along with the Google Search Console. These are 2 formidable tools to use. In order to compete at a professional level. But you cannot however run a speed check with these 2 Google tools. But the Google Search Console will track your site progress and performance though.

Speed test improvement on the Home Page.

Running a speed test. The blog home page is what opens first. Which is why image format and file size is so important. And in the end, it’s all about user experience to boost the Alexa rank. Because that ultimately leads to better ranking capability in search engines. Be sure all image files are uploaded to your blog as JPG files for better compression. From banners to featured images for both posts and pages.

Use a “clean theme”. Don’t overpopulate the home page with a tsunami of images and colors. When adding banners to post and pages is comer recommended to use plugins like “WP Insert”. This way banner html cannot influence the site SEO score in search engines. And some banner html code can cause the home page to load slightly slower. But “slightly slower” on a 2 second scale is still slower! For home page banner displays rather use an image widget. While redirecting the image (with title, description and alt attribute) to the designated URL.

See how your site performs, reveal why it’s slow and discover optimization opportunities. Test your page on a real Android device or on over 20 different Simulated Device options. Analyze your performance with iPhones, iPads, Samsung Galaxy/Note, Google Nexus/Pixel phones, and other popular devices.

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In conclusion to site speed test results.

These are all tiny steps to a better speed test result. And as mentioned earlier. On a 2 – 5 second scale even 0.5 – 0.9 seconds faster is a rather large improvement. Another great Google developer tool is called “Page Speed Insights”. Simply run a test to analyse your site speed. And see all issues causing your site to load slow.

Site speed is crucial because it’s all about user experience. Which is why it can also play a role in the bounce rate. A load speed of 2 – 5 seconds is advised. Although a load speed of 3.6 seconds is still considered slow by Alexa. Use the tools as mentioned in the post above. And get to know your way around these tools. Because not only are they crucial to site speed. But also, on site SEO. Do not forget that site speed has been indicated as one of the signals used by Google algorithms to rank pages. Therefore, site speed plays a large part of ranking capability.

What about internet speed bandwidth?

Your personal internet speed plays a role from your side. Which is why it’s important to use extensions like Alexa. Sometimes your site may load slow on your side. Due to slow bandwidth. Which will not affect the Alexa extension mentioned in the post. The Alexa extension will give you the correct result. Regardless of your own internet speed.

Apart from all the tools and tricks there is also hosting. Where basic (shared) hosting may result in your site loading slower than pro hosting for instance. And a great blogging method is getting hosting with Blue Host and then installing WordPress as the site builder.

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