You cannot make your website profitable if it performs poorly and loads sluggishly. The most profitable website nowadays is the fastest one. Building a fast website seems to be a simple task; however, because you also have to decorate it to make it beautiful, to furbish its content with infographics and other weighty media, and to monetize it with ads, which are known to significantly slow down your website’s speed, building a fast website turns out to be a rather complex task. If you want to ensure the optimal performance of your website, you can check using Speedcheck Speed Test. And here are some great tools that you can use.
Speed Measurement Tools
In order to find out whether you have a sluggish website, you need to measure its speed. Here are some great tools to measure your website’s speed.
1. GTmetrix
GTmetrix is among the most favored tools for measuring a website’s speed because its performance report is brief but helpful. With this tool, you can have your website evaluated and appraised to see how fast or sluggish it is. When you use this tool, you can get the overall speed rating of your website, with rating A signifying highest speed. GTmetrix also provides you with information about every element that affects your website’s speed and some recommendations to improve it.
2. Google Analytics
Your website’s speed actually becomes Google’s concern because Google relies on websites like yours for advertising purpose. To help you improve your website’s performance, Google provides you with Google Analytics, a handy tool that can be used to analyze every aspect of your website, including its speed. With Google Analytics, you can monitor all pages in your website and detect which ones have the lowest loading speed.
Image Optimization Tools
As said earlier, you will be using various media to decorate your website and to enrich its content. The most heavily used of them is the image. And a lot of images on your website will slow it down significantly. With image optimization tools, you can slim down your images and make their size significantly smaller. Here are some image optimizations tools that you can use.
1. Adobe Photoshop
Adobe Photoshop is always the handiest tool for optimizing your images. With this tool, you can easily reduce the size of your image, proportionally or not, using the Image Size option on the image menu. Adobe Photoshop also has a handy function that allows you to determine the size and quality of your image when you save it. The Save for Web option on the File menu does this. In the latest Adobe Photoshop releases, this handy function is still available, though it is marked as a legacy function.
2. TinyPNG
TinyPNG is similar to other online tools, such as Kraken.io, which allow you to compress your images and to make them load faster. TinyPNG will remove unnecessary junks in your image, blend slightly different colors whose difference cannot be detected by your eyes, and make the size of your images smaller. Of course, you can do these jobs with Photoshop, but if you want to do a bulk operation, TinyPNG can be a great tool to use.
Website Optimization Tools
If your website still feels sluggish even after you optimize its content and dump all unnecessary elements, the sluggishness is perhaps because your website’s built-in elements and codes are not properly optimized. There are many tools that you can use to optimize your website. Although some of those tools are available as plugins that are suitable only for specific platforms, such as WordPress or Blogspot, there are actually also tools that are available for all websites regardless of the platforms that they use. Take a look at the tools below to see some tools that you can use to optimize your website.
1. YUI Compressor
YUI Compressor is a handy tool to optimize your website’s CSS and JavaScript. CSS is responsible for regulating the placement and appearance of elements on your website and JavaScript is used mostly to add some extra functions to your website. Those codes, if not optimized properly, will bog down your website, making it sluggish. With YUI Compressor, you can optimize those codes and enhance the speed of your website.
2. Cloudflare CDN
One possible factor that may affect the loading speed of your website is the distance between the people who access it and the server where your website is hosted. With a CDN, you can shorten this distance significantly. Of all CDNs available on the internet, CloudFare is often considered the most reliable.