3 Tools for Optimizing Your Website’s Page Speed

We live in a mobile age, and technological advancements have made people expect things speedily. It is not enough that your web page loads fast. If your definition of ‘fast’ is not under 2 or 3 seconds, you will probably have several displeased visitors.

Therefore, website speed and overall website performance are very integral to SEO. After all, slow-loading websites experience high bounce rates, which leads to low engagement, and all of these signal to search engines that your website is not good enough. Subsequently, your website rankings go lower.

So you can see how a slow-loading website can cascade into several issues that affect your website’s reliability and public perception of your brand. Optimizing your website’s speed for effectiveness requires using good tools, and here we’ll be considering three: Google PageSpeed Insights, GTmetrix, and Eye10 Pagespeed Checker.

However, let’s first consider the technique for calculating the speed of a web page.

How PageSpeed is Calculated

It might interest you to know that both Google PageSpeed Insights and GTmetrix derive their results from a single source known as Google Lighthouse.

Lighthouse is an open-source tool for improving the overall quality of web pages. It audits performance, accessibility, progressive web apps, SEO, and more.

However, Google Lighthouse is more oriented toward developers. For most SEO professionals, most of the details are not required to be known unless in special circumstances.

So, tools such as PageSpeed Insights and GTmetrix simplify the results, especially when you want to know how fast your page runs, which is just a part of the overall website performance.

But, from the beginning, we have mentioned that this article is about three tools, not two. So where does the Eye10 Pagespeed checker tool feature in all of this? Read on to find out.

Google PageSpeed Insights

The most popular tool for optimizing website page speed is the Google PageSpeed Insights tool. Besides the fact that the results are reliable because they come from Google itself, which runs the most prominent search engine in the world, PageSpeed Insights is also loved because it is a free tool.

Results from PageSpeed Insights are categorized according to mobile and desktop reports so you can know how your website performs on each type of device and optimize accordingly.

Although the tool has ‘PageSpeed’ in its name, it measures more than the speed of pages. Besides performance, it also detects issues with accessibility, best practices, and SEO. However, on the page speed end, results are based on Google’s Core Web Vitals, which primarily includes the following:

• First Contentful Paint (FCP): the speed at which the first text or image is loaded.
• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): the speed at which the largest block of text or media is loaded.
• Speed Index: how quickly the web page is visibly populated with content.

Of course, there are more metrics. Overall, they each measure the speed of your page based on various approaches. However, the best thing about Google PageSpeed Insights is its actionable recommendations, with tips on enhancing your site speed and performance.

GTmetrix

If you are more interested in using a non-Google tool to analyze the performance of your web pages, then perhaps the next most popular page speed tool is GTmetrix.

Like PageSpeed Insights, GTmetrix summarizes your page performance analysis in a clear report. However, not just that. It can also track the performance of your web page over time when you set up a schedule to automatically keep track of how your page is doing.

Then, by setting up notifications, you can get alerts with links to a comprehensive report whenever the system detects an issue with your page or determines that your web page is underperforming.

Again, like PageSpeed Insights, GTmetrix provides actionable results with recommendations on optimizing your web pages and resolving any issues that may obstruct their performance.

Although GTmetrix is free, some features are only available in the pro version, such as the Simulated Device features, through which you can test how your page would load on different specific mobile devices, up to thirty.

Another paid feature is the Premium Test Locations feature, which lets you discover your page performance in 22 test locations worldwide. This is a great feature for international websites.

Eye10 Pagespeed Checker

Different website performance tools post different scores depending on their configurations.

However, we have already mentioned that Google PageSpeed Insights, GTmetrix, and other tools, including Web. Dev and WebPage Test use the same Google Lighthouse framework. So, why should the scores be different?

The distinctions lie in how each tool implements Google Lighthouse’s analysis. There are different implementation methodologies and so the scores may vary slightly. For example, differences may occur due to the Lighthouse version that a tool uses, browser version differences, length of the test, etc.

Therefore, using the Eye10 Pagespeed tool is the best option since it implements results from two of the most prominent website performance testing tools using the same framework.

Instead of duplicating Google Lighthouse on yet another website performance tool only to post similar scores as all the already existing tools, Eye10 Pagespeed brings multiple results together to give you a more comprehensive website performance analysis, particularly as it has to do with the speed of content delivery on web pages.

Conclusion

Calculating the speed of a webpage, as you have seen, is hardly a straightforward affair. Instead, you must ensure you can access comprehensive results and recommendations to optimize your web pages accordingly.

Eye10 Pagespeed checker remains the best tool for determining and optimizing the performance of your website. With only $3, you can sign up to access this tool and other SEO tools from Eye10 to enhance your ranking opportunities.