Google has been on a mission lately: to improve the security and performance of the web as a whole. You can see the obsession with speed in their products. There is AMP, an initiative to massively speed-up pages on mobile devices. Then there is Google Fiber, increasing internet speeds across the nation through competition. Finally, the Google Developer Guidelines suggest a response time of a maximum of 200ms and a page-load of one second for the top of the fold. If you haven’t already done so, it is time to make the speed of your website a part of your SEO process. Here are some of the tools you will need to use:
Google Page Speed Insights is the most important of all the tools in this list. Nothing is more important than Google’s perception of performance, and this is the only way to see how your site performs.
Pingdom is a great tool for setting baselines and gathering metrics on your site performance. One key advantage with Pingdom is the ability to test with servers hosted overseas which is very important when international traffic is critical.
GTMetrix is another tool for measuring the user experience. The killer feature here is that you can play back a video of the user experience timeline and see for yourself where the problems are and how it looks.
You should use multiple tools when capturing data, this way you can validate your existing data and accuracy. Very soon page speed will be a critical factor and if you start now, might have an advantage over late-adopters.
