How To Check Your Site Speed + Leverage Browser Caching Part 1

Recently I sent a blog over to a client because I thought it was a great fit for a guest post to promote their company. They came back saying YES LET’S DO IT, but when they tested the blogger's site they found it was loading very slow.

When I checked the blog one of the primary issues it had was Browser Caching, and spot-checking a few other sites I found the same issue.

This interaction got me thinking a few things:

1. Site speed is becoming more important to clients + it is a metric some are checking, therefore it’s something we need to start checking as well.
2. Personal blogs are likely to have a worse site speed because in general they are less technical and don’t have the budget to afford a tech team.

These are both assumptions of course, and through writing + promoting this post, we will discover how accurate these assumptions are. But my guess just based on experience is, this topic needs some attention.

If you are a blogger then this blog post series is for you. If you are a company with a blog, this may also be useful, however, it is more likely you have some kind of technical assistance. If that is the case just ask your team member to let you know what your site speed is + what improvements they recommend.

Bloggers, this series will help you optimize one aspect of your WordPress blog to increase your site speed. It might not be that browser caching is an issue for your blog - but I will say that when I checked several other blogs I did find browser caching was one of the primary issues which was slowing down the sites.

In this post, we are just going to check the site speed, in Part 2, I will show you how to optimize your browsing cache. So make sure you are signed up to our newsletter - you won’t want to
miss the next post!

How To Check Your Site Speed

What do you think the current patience level is of your visitors? I dare you to have a guess now. How long do you think someone will wait for your page to load on their mobile, desktop or tablet before clicking off and visiting someone else's site?

20 seconds, 15 seconds, 10 seconds?

Well – one quarter of people will leave your page if it hasn’t loaded in 4 seconds. That is 25% of your traffic gone, lost, probably never to return unless you are recapturing them on Facebook.

4 seconds.

So, your goal is to get your site speed to under 4 seconds. I just spot-checked 10 personal blogs that we have in our database, this was their site speed:

·      Site 1 > 15.5 Seconds
·      Site 2 > 7.7 Seconds
·      Site 3 > 6.04 Seconds
·      Site 4 > 7.04 Seconds
·      Site 5 > 4.91 Seconds
·      Site 6 > 14.04 Seconds
·      Site 7 > 3.14 Seconds
·      Site 8 > 3.63 Seconds
·      Site 9 > 3.78 Seconds
·      Site 10 > 5.70 Seconds

So out of 10 sites, 3 had the goal site speed. Clearly, this needs some work!

So let's get stuck in.

First things first, check your site speed here for free: 

CHECK SITE SPEED WITH PINGDOM

With Pingdom you are able to test your site from different locations. In this test, I chose Dallas Texas, USA.

Once you hit ‘Start Test’ you will get a summary of your site speed as above. You can see here that Ginger Marketing HQ has a load time of 3.32 seconds.

It only gets a C though, there is still a lot of room for improvement.

If you scroll down you will get a further breakdown of site speed issues. Check for leverage browser caching, if this is an issue for you then sign up to our newsletter so you get Part 2, where I will take you through a step-by-step process for leveraging your browser cache.

If it is not an issue for you then great! But, check the other points. Even better, go one step further and email me with your number one issue and I will create a post about how you and other bloggers can fix this too!

There is no reason we should lose traffic from our blog because of a slow site. And believe me, you don’t need to be technical to understand or execute on these issues. I am the least technical person ever, which means I will need to do a ton of research and make the process super, super simple if I am going to understand this and explain it to you.

So, no worries - we got this.

Until next time.

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