Website PageSpeed on Pingdom
What is Pingdom?
Pingdom crawls your site and makes recommendations to improve the speed of your website. There are a lot of complicated terms and codes but thankfully for all of us that use WordPress, there are plugins for that.
Why is PageSpeed Important?
This has always been somewhat important but has become more important recently with Facebook releasing Instant Articles and Google releasing Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP). Research has shown the time it takes a page to load has a direct impact on users staying on your site. They go back to the previous site if it takes a while to load the page. AMP pages are saved as an image to load faster instead of code.
Pagespeed has also become an important ranking factor in search engines. Google and Bing have AMP or mobile usability in their webmaster tools. I can’t recommend using any AMP pages as of the time of this article. We have experimented with AMP and it does not convert users yet. The main reason is the form integration is worthless at this point.
Plugins We Use to Increase Pagespeed
Autoptimize
I’m honestly not sure the technical coding and how it improves Pagespeed but it eliminated a lot of things that hurt your pagespeed and YSlow score.
Autoptimize says on the plugin page to the question, “What does the plugin do to help speed up my site?”
It concatenates all scripts and styles, minifies and compresses them, adds expires headers, caches them, and moves styles to the page head, and scripts (optionally) to the footer. It also minifies the HTML code itself, making your page really lightweight.
This plugin is free.
Cloudflare
Cloudflare is a Content Delivery Network (CDN) that offers a free account. It’s important to use a CDN to host static files, such as images and videos, on a different server that your host to deliver them faster. If you use WordPress you don’t have to change any setting on your website. You will need to change your nameservers with your host. Your nameservers will have to be pointed at Cloudflare servers. If you use an investor template I doubt you will be able to use a CDN since the template provider typically host the site.
A CDN also gives you a shared SSL certificate on your site. This is important for Pagespeed also. A secure site is more trusted by search engines than an http site. Google and Bing refer https now. http/2 is coming soon.
If you can use a CDN you can route your Royaltie Beacons to your website by having an https site.
Final Thoughts
In the age of constant technology improvements it can be hard to keep up. Thankfully, there are free tools like Pingdom to help those of us that aren’t online experts. You need to check into page speed and monitor Google AMP progress. They will eventually figure it out and it will force all of us to convert our pages to AMP. As of right now you have to create 2 pages for every webpage since AMP doesn’t format some of the latest improvements to technology. Facebook Instant Articles work like they should without creating additional pages for mobile.
We look around for small wins in Real Estate, Technology, and anything that can improve our business. We’ve wasted thousands of dollars testing methods and technology. We only tell you about what passes the test with us and actually helps our business.
Here is EarlToms report from Pingdom. We’re not perfect either.
