Technical SEO tools: Speed testing

- [Illustrator] Site speed is a critical part of technical SEO. It impacts more than just your ability to rank, it impacts how long your visitors are willing to put up with your slow site speed. It can even negatively impact your conversion rates. And as of May, 2021, speed will be a core part of Google's ranking algorithm. That's why several of the videos in this course, deal with speed issues and how to solve them. But first, in order to know what you have to fix, you have to find the problems, that's where speed testing tools come in. There are many, many tools out there, and I'm going to show you some of my favorites. The good news is most of these tools are free, so you can save your budget to pay for a developer to fix things up instead. The speed testing tool that many people turn to first, is Google's Page Speed Insights tool or PSI. PSI gives you the insight in how Google will judge your site in their core algorithm, and I think it's a key part of speed testing. But the information it gives you, isn't always the most intuitive to work with, especially, if you're relatively new to this whole technical SEO thing. I've run the Wisdom Pet site through the PSI tool, and it actually does pretty well, with a high, but not perfect score on mobile and desktop. You can see here how it rates the two web vitals that it can measure, largest Contentful Paint, and Cumulative Layout Shift. For more information on what these metrics are, you want to watch the video on "What Are Google's Core Web Vitals?" The PSI tool only lets you check one page at a time. And, of course, site speed doesn't judge, just based on your homepage, you really do need to test all the pages on your site. I recommend another free tool called Batch Speed, which you can find at batchspeed.com. This tool run all the pages on your site through the tester, which gives you a nice bird's eye view of which pages' the hottest trash fires to work on first. But if you want a slightly more helpful experience, that does, in my opinion, a better job of outlining what to fix, use GTmetrics. It's also free, but with paid options, and you can sign up for a free account that gives you some options to use when you run your tests. Personally, I like trying a site from a few different speeds to mimic what someone might be seeing as slow mobile connection, in an older device, instead of my nice, shiny new computer with a fiber internet connection. You can also set up your sites to be checked regularly, which can be a bit of a lifesaver, if you aren't very involved in the development process. There's really nothing more exciting than finding out a change was made to the website, and surprise, your speed scores are now in the toilet. There are also other speed testing tools out there like webpagetest.org, and wattspeed.com. I recommend picking a few tools that you feel comfortable with, but every once in a while, check your sites in these other tools as well, they all test things and interpret results in a slightly different way. And sometimes it's nice to get that extra perspective, particularly, when you have a difficult website to work with. In addition to GT metrics and these other speed tools, you'll want to use Google Chrome's built-in speed tools. I go over using that tool quite a bit in the video, on "How To Understand A Website's Speed Report," and in the video on "The Website Inspector." One common thing that you'll likely see in the results of all these speed tools, is that your JavaScript files have issues. They're either too large, or taking too long to process, or they're holding up things in some other way. Sometimes it can be really difficult to talk to your developers about these issues. And in that case, I would like to direct your attention to Yellow Lab Tools at yellowlab.tools, also free. This is probably the most technical out of all the speed testing tools that we use, and that's because it really does help developers identify issues in their JavaScript. Honestly, you can likely run a page through to here, and turn over the results to a developer, and let them edit. Last but not least, Of course, you want to use Google Search Console. Once you have your site set up in Google Search Console, use the Core Web Vital section to look at how your site is performing. It won't give you results for every single page, and the number of results you get depends on how popular your site is, but this is the best way to know what Google is seeing. Between all these speed tools, you should have an excellent grasp of what's wrong with your site when it comes to speed issues.