Your users' experience in terms of navigating your site should be great reason. Users have many options when it comes to consuming content on the internet, and a slow performing website will frustrate your users, sending them elsewhere. A faster and more responsive website will keep them more engaged and focused on your content, rather than waiting for scripts and images to load.
Another reason is for SEO. Google has announced they are using page speed in their ranking algorithm.
This means that faster performing sites may rank higher in search engine results. As developers and marketers look to optimize their sites, page speed should be among the top optimizations to consider.
It's all about efficiency and optimization. Your site may be loading fast, but it could be faster if you take some of the best practices into consideration. You even might be able to reduce bandwidth and hosting costs by minimizing your footprint.
Start optimizing your site! GTmetrix provides explainations for each recommendation, and gives you actionable advice. The recommendations in the table you see are ordered in terms of which have the most impact on your site. Fixing items at the top of your list can have a bigger impact on your overall score.
Make sure you fully understand the recommendations before you begin though. Though many of them are applicable to your site, some are not. The recommendations are meant to be generic, best practices - you don't need to fix everything.
Need help? GTmetrix's developer, Gossamer Threads, can handle all of your speed optimization requirements.
Feel free to contact us if you have any questions.
It's a start - but the code that really needs to be optimized is the user facing code. Front end optimization (of CSS, javascript, images, HTML, etc) is what's going to make the most impact on your users. Often we only concentrate on server side optimizations, making the code as efficient as possible there; but we forget that we can get an even bigger speed increase if we optimize the front end code as well.
Page Speed and YSlow use different recommendations when analyzing URLs. Each service analyzes a page using a set of rules that they believe are most relevant to page speed and performance. Most of the rules overlap or are very similar to each other, but in general your scores should be comparable.
Visit our Recommendations page for a list of each service's best practices.
The post-analysis recommendations are not always relevant to your site (EG. You do not need a CDN if you're running a small website or blog). This is why it's important to truly understand the recommendations and how they can affect your site. Not everything will apply to your site.
Visit our Recommendations page to learn more about each recommendation.
Most sites include code for services like ads, analytics or other widgets. These bits of code may fetch javascript or CSS from other sources. Of course, since you have no control over these resources, there's nothing you can (or need to) do.
No, not at all! Start with the recommendations at the top. The report organizes recommendations in order of what has the most impact on your score.
Realize that 100% is not realistic, and a green score generally means your site is speed optimized. Remember that these tools are meant to be used for a wide variety of site types, and so some recommendations may not apply to your site.
In general, there is no definitive answer one way or the other. Google has indicated they want a faster web, and to be able to "flip through sites" visually (like a magazine), which requires sites rendering fast and caching well. Google has also stated:
"While site speed is a new signal, it doesn't carry as much weight as the relevance of a page."
But don't do it for SEO, do it for your users!
Check to see if your URL is in the proper format (eg. http://www.example.com). Another reason may be that the URL you entered requires you to be logged in first, and or it is being redirected to another URL.
Some URLs might not work for any number of reasons. For example, sites that are all flash will not yield a proper score; this is a limitation in YSlow & Page Speed, which do not take flash components into consideration when scoring. Here are the errors that might prevent your URL from being analyzed:
We're still in beta too, so there may be a few kinks that need to be worked out!
If you have a URL that won't analyze that you believe should, please contact us and let us know.
Once you've analyzed a URL, you'll arrive at its report page. Click on "Page Settings" on the left hand side in the Options box. Under the "Monitoring" heading there is a dropdown that allows for different monitoring schedules. Choose your desired schedule and save your settings.
GTmetrix will now monitor the specified URL.
We're experimenting with the scalability of GTmetrix, so at the moment you can only monitor 10 URLs.
There are no limits to how many reports you can save.
Saving a URL means that you have saved the latest run report on that URL. This is great if you want to do a before and after comparison when your optimizations are complete.
Monitoring a URL means that you have GTmetrix running scheduled reports (daily, weekly, monthly) on the speed performance of your site. This works well for developers who are doing ongoing upgrades and optimizations.
Yes - If you don't want anybody to see a particular report for your URL, click on "Page Settings" on the left hand side in the Options box. Under the "Privacy" heading you can choose whether or not to make the report private, or allow anybody to see it.
Keep in mind that though a private report is protected from public view, anybody can create a report for any URL. If you can load the URL in your browser, you can analyze it in GTmetrix.
A good reason could be that there haven't been major changes or optimizations done to that URL. GTmetrix tracks the speed performance of URLs, but unless any development or improvements have been done, the graphs will keep a straight line.
Monitoring is good for developers who are doing ongoing testing or optimizations for their site and want to track it over time.
The GTmetrix bookmarklet is a snippet of JavaScript tool that allows you to analyze the performance of the current page with a single click.
FireFox, Safari, Chrome users: Drag the button onto your bookmarks toolbar and click on it when you're at a site you want to analyze.
Internet Explorer users: Right click on the button and click "Add to Favourites". GTmtetrix's bookmarklet contains JavaScript, so you will receive a security warning; click "Yes" to continue.
For easier access, move your bookmarklet to the IE Favourites Toolbar and click on it when you're at a site you want to analyze.
After having generated a report for a URL, click "Compare to another URL" in the top left "Options" box. An overlay will appear where you can enter the URL you wish to compare with the report. You will then be taken to the Compare screen with the comparison results.
If you would like to compare more URLs, click the "Add another URL" button - you are able to add up to 4 different URLs.
Note: The report from which you clicked "Compare to another URL" will be the base report. All additional reports will be compared against this report.
The percentages represent the difference from the base report you've generated. The report from which you clicked "Compare to another URL" will be the base report. All additional reports will be compared against this report.
This is especially useful for comparing the same URLs after speed optimizations, since you can see how each compare to a base or starting point.
Yes! View the report that you want to be the base, and copy the URL of the report you want to compare it to. Click "Compare to another URL" and paste the URL. GTmetrix will recognize the URL structure and pull the report data for comparison.
These arrows indicate your performance relative to the other sites that GTmetrix has analyzed in the past 30 days.
The green arrow pointing up indicates that you've scored higher than the average.
The red arrow pointing down indicates that you've scored lower than the average.
The orange arrow pointing in both directions indicates that you've scored within +/- 5% of the average.
This is useful because you can see which rules might require more attention than others. For example, if you scored an F (0) for YSlow's "Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)" rule, you can rest assured knowing that thousands of other sites have the roughly same score; Don't worry about it if you're running a smaller site, and don't want to pay/can't afford a CDN.
GTmetrix's waterfall graph is generated using Honza's HTTP Archive Viewer, which closely resembles what you would see in the Net panel of the Firebug extension.
Reading and understanding a waterfall graph is a bit more involved than what we can get into here, so here are a few links that can get you started: