To check how fast your pages load try these tools:
Pingdom Website Speed Test
http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/
Google PageSpeed Insights
http://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
- Page Speed, an open source Firefox/Firebug add-on that evaluates the performance of web pages and gives suggestions for improvement.
- YSlow, a free tool from Yahoo! that suggests ways to improve website speed.
- WebPagetest shows a waterfall view of your pages’ load performance plus an optimization checklist.
- In Webmaster Tools, Labs > Site Performance shows the speed of your website as experienced by users around the world as in the chart below. We’ve also blogged aboutsite performance.
- Many other tools on code.google.com/speed.
- http://zoompf.com/free
- http://gtmetrix.com/
Infographic about webpage speed (pdf)
Why speed matters
According to the Aberdeen Group, a one second delay in page-load time equals 11% fewer page views, a 16% decrease in customer satisfaction, and 7% loss in conversions.
According to the UK: Internet Statistics Compendium which includes Data from Rackspace, 38% of UK online shoppers abandon websites or apps that take more than 10 seconds to load.
Speed is a metric used by Google to rank search results, Google considers a page to be ‘slow’ if it takes longer than 1.5 seconds to load.
74% of users will leave after waiting five seconds for a mobile site to load.
According to surveys done by Akamai and Gomez.com, nearly half of web users expect a site to load in 2 seconds or less, and they tend to abandon a site that isn’t loaded within 3 seconds. 79% of web shoppers who have trouble with web site performance say they won’t return to the site to buy again and around 44% of them would tell a friend if they had a poor experience shopping online.
Facts and Stats about pagespeed
- 73% of mobile internet users say that they’ve encountered a website that was too slow to load. »tweet«
- 51% of mobile internet users say that they’ve encountered a website that crashed, froze, or received an error. »tweet«
- 38% of mobile internet users say that they’ve encountered a website that wasn’t available. »tweet«
- 47% of consumers expect a web page to load in 2 seconds or less. »tweet«
- 40% of people abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load.»tweet«
- A 1 second delay in page response can result in a 7% reduction in conversions. »tweet«
- If an e-commerce site is making $100,000 per day, a 1 second page delay could potentially cost you $2.5 million in lost sales every year. »tweet«
This is why you should consider using a VPS server and not shared hosting
Shared hosting simply means that many websites are hosted on a single web server, and that the server’s resources (CPU and RAM) are shared among every customer account on the machine.
Shared hosting plans are pretty cheap but this does not mean they are not good. The major word that causes problems for shared hosting users is the word “Unlimited“.
Sources for this article:
http://blog.kissmetrics.com/loading-time/
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.no/2010/04/using-site-speed-in-web-search-ranking.html