Pagespeed, the loading time of a website, is a topic that is gaining renewed importance in the development and operation of websites. Although the speed of common internet connections has steadily increased, at the same time web applications tend to become more complex and extensive: content management systems with complete CSS and Javascript frameworks, elaborate image material and multimedia functions continue to exhaust the bandwidths.
Therefore, the optimisation of loading times is a customer service in the sense of good usability of one's own online offer. And last but not least, Google, as probably the most important search engine provider, never tires of emphasising the importance of short loading times for the ranking in the search results.
How fast is my website?
The offers for measuring online loading times are large and confusing. The mere time it takes for my homepage to load is not very meaningful - more important is an assessment of the degree of optimisation: Is the loading time "good" or "bad", is there still room for improvement?
In the following, we would like to introduce a tool that provides comprehensive and clear performance data and concrete improvement options at the click of a mouse. It is a browser add-on called "All-In-One PageSpeed Test", which is available for Mozilla Firefox as well as Google Chrome.
After installation, the addon places an icon in the browser window that, when clicked, displays pagespeed reports from Yellow Lab Tools, Google's Pagespeed Insights and GTmetrix in three new tabs for the page currently displayed in the browser.
These three services each give an overall rating between 0 and 100 and list the criteria evaluated in detail.
They set different priorities and can therefore also arrive at different ratings for a website. However, this is what makes the compilation of these offers so attractive, because the results obtained complement each other very well and provide a comprehensive overall picture of the performance.
All offers also provide detailed information and sometimes concrete instructions on how optimisations can be implemented and how important or promising the proposed improvements are.
This makes it quick and easy to assess the performance of one's own web presence, to receive suggestions for optimisation and to monitor the success of implemented optimisation steps through further tests.
See also
This article contains a list of measures you can take yourself to make your site load faster. A fast website is another factor to get a better ranking in Google.
Increasingly, so-called experience factors, i.e. user-friendliness parameters, are playing a decisive role in Google's ranking. In particular, the Core Web Vitals, a series of measurements of the loading time of websites, are being taken more into account.
This means that beyond the content of the respective homepage, the loading time is another purely technical factor that comes into focus.
