A guide to understanding the speed of your website and speed test tools like Google PageSpeed Insights, Google Lighthouse Speed Test or Pingdom Speed Test.
Page speed is one of the most crucial elements of a website.
Having a quick loading time is essential for:
The average person spends approximately 10–20 seconds on a webpage before leaving.
If a page takes longer than 2 seconds to load, 47% of visitors will leave almost immediately, while 40% of visitors leave 3 seconds into the page loading process.
Page speed is dependent on a variety of factors, including:
- Server configuration
- A site’s HTML structure
- JavaScript files
- Images
- CSS, and much more
With various items factored into page speed — and so much relying on page speed to capture a visitor’s attention and convert — many website owners rely on different page speed tests, such as Google PageSpeed Insights or Pingdom, to see if their site’s speed is up to snuff.
But here’s the thing:
Not all page speed tests are created equal.
Some page speed tests weigh CSS more heavily than JavaScript files, while others take the amount and quality of the images on a page into greater account.