Introduction to Page Speed SEO Tools

English In this lecture, we are going to see an Introduction to the PageSpeed tools that we are going to use. I’ve planned to demonstrate 2 websites to optimize the various PageSpeed techniques that you’re going to learn in this section. The first site is seo.inspirearun.com and it’s based on the latest theme from WordPress itself. It's very sleek or we can call it minimal. So it's a lightweight website. But this is how Google recommends you to keep your website now-a-days. The second website is inspirearun.com, which is a pretty modern website, and is based on the Divi theme from Elegant themes, which is an easy to use, drag and drop design based theme. It’s premium, a bit heavy, but still fast enough and efficient among the drag and drop based themes. We will be using 3 pagespeed testing tools in this section. Google’s Pagespeed Insights tool Webpagetest Pingdom Tools Now let's move on to PageSpeed Insights tool from Google. In this tool, you will get a set of guidelines that you need to implement in your site, to get the best PageSpeed possible. Since this tool is from Google itself, the algorithm that is used in this tool is up to date and you can rely upon the recommendations that's given by this tool. But you don't need to chase this 100 out of 100 PageSpeed score from this tool. If you’ve got to load your website under 2 seconds, then these scores don't matter. At the end of the day, the important thing that matters is the page load time and not this PageSpeed score. Now let's come to this second tool, Webpagetest. This tool allows you to check your load time from various locations, across various devices, browsers and connection speeds. Moreover this is the only tool where you can check the difference in load time between first view and repeated views. Based on the locations and connection speed you choose, your load times can vary significantly. If you choose a location nearer to your server, your load time will be good. Faster connection speeds can give quicker load times, but sometimes you might want to check how your website performs in a slower 3G connection too. So as a standard we use the default Dulles for location, chrome browser and cable connection. Sometimes, even after optimizing to the maximum possible recommendations given in pagespeed insights, you might not get the best page loading time. For example, you might be getting a page load time of around 5 seconds or sometimes, even more than that. In that case, this webpagetest tool will give you some more easy recommendations that you can implement on your website, to improve the Page loading time. Instead of scores, Webpagetest gives you grades for several different things such as, security, First byte time, Compress images or transfer, cache static content etc, and it also shows whether you’ve added a CDN to your website or not. CDN means Content Delivery Network. We will see more of CDN in the upcoming lectures. There are multiple load times displayed here in Webpagetest. The load time you need to care about, are these. First Byte time, the repeat view load time under Document complete and Fully loaded columns. Even after optimizing your website based on our Pagespeed techniques, if you’re getting slower load times, then the first thing we will inspect is this First Byte time. It’s the time taken from the moment a user enters your URL on their browser to the moment when their browser receives the first byte of your website from your server. So, technically the users will be seeing just a white blank page with the loading animation repeating during this first byte time. Around 75% of this first byte time which is also called server response time can be reduced by switching to a fast hosting provider or a powerful plan that your website needs. Technically, more CPU cores, RAM, fast SSD storage can reduce this first byte time. This can be further reduced by opting to HTTPS protocol and adding a CDN to your site. Google recommends you to keep the first byte time or the response time under 200 ms or 0.2s, which is possible only if you host your site with a VPS or a Dedicated hosting plan costing from $50 to $200 per month. But still with a shared hosting plan in the range of $5 a month you can get a first byte time within the maximum allowable range of <600 ms or 0.6s. If your website takes more than 600 ms of first byte time, then it’s time for you to switch your hosting provider. This test website 1 is hosted on a stablehost shared hosting, for which I pay a little less than $5 a month. I’m also using HTTPS and CDN on this site. So, you cannot expect more than 500ms response time from such servers normally. When it comes to guidelines or recommendations to be implemented on your site follow these 2 tools alone, PageSpeed insights tool and Webpagetest tool, because these 2 tools are the industry standard, reliable and updated ones, when it comes to recommendations. Moving onto the third tool, Pingdom tools. It allows you to check the load time of your website from various locations. Though it provides you this performance insights info, don’t take this into account and don't try to optimize your website based on these recommendations as they are a bit outdated and these recommendations don’t necessarily improve your load times. The reason we are using pingdom tools is that, since it doesn’t check your site thrice along with repeat view load times and all, it’s generally quicker than webpagetest and it’s much simpler to use. You might have noticed that I have got around 0.5 s load time under Pingdom tools, whereas I have got 1.5 seconds load time, under Webpagetest tool. This doesn't mean one of the tools is wrong. This load time can vary based on several factors such as the location chosen or the speed of the internet connection. But, let me give you some Benchmark timing, which you can set, as a target. In the webpagetest tool, you should get a first byte time less than 0.6s and a fully loaded repeat view time less than 3 s. These are the maximum allowable time. But, if you can achieve something less than this benchmark time, that's superb. You can get such load times only when you use a PageSpeed Optimized minimalistic theme along with the reasonably fast server and the best pagespeed optimization possible, which you will learn from this section. But, if your load time falls just under 3 seconds, that's good too. No issue at all. Regarding any other pagespeed testing tools like GTMetrix, I suggest not to use them for the recommendations. Because, they are not consistent and reliable over time. Before we optimize your website for the best PageSpeed, we need to take some precautionary steps. So let's see how to take a backup of your database as a fail safe in the next lecture.