Admit it, as a store owner, you want your online store to have as many functions as possible, right? Hiring experts is costly, so you might want to refer to some free speed optimization tools.
You tend to choose eye-catching themes that grab customers’ attention. And of course, you want to sell a variety of items to generate revenue. Hence, you install tons of apps for your store. However, while doing so, you are encountering a common problem: slow site performance.
Let me explain, you put more features to your site, hence it’s hard to achieve a high level of performance. Your web is visually appealing. It has various functions, apps, and features. However, the site performance is bad, leading to a low conversion rate and awful user experience.
To increase sales and keep your customers stay longer, optimizing site performance is a necessary task.
I know web performance optimization can cost you a lot to hire experts or third-parties, but free tools might be more economic. What are the free necessary tools that allow you to optimize your site performance? Let’s explore more!
How important is site performance
Since the performance of your site is related directly to the user experience, optimizing it is really important. As customers hate waiting too long for a site to load, they tend to exit the website without hesitation. This will lead to an increased bounce rate for your site. Besides, good site performance can also help to increase sales. Because the customers will abandon the shopping cart immediately if the transaction process is too slow, the conversion rate and the revenue will be reduced significantly. If store owners want to check how site performance affects their revenue, they can check out Google’s Testmysite tool. This tool is especially useful for mobile site speed test.
Free tools for speed optimization
You will be able to find a variety of speed checking tools on the internet. However, there are only 3 primary and necessary ones to check site performance successfully.
This is the most popular tool for checking site performance. Google’s PageSpeed Insights provides the information related to your web speed, both on the desktop and mobile devices. It gives you the score for your web performance and provides several recommendations to improve the site speed. When users require analysis on one website, PageSpeed Insights will give them important indexes related to the performance of that website. In order to find out more about this tool as well as the important indexes in speed optimization, check out this blog by HappyPoints.
This is another free and popular tool to explore more. There are more than 450 million pages that have been analyzed by GTMetrix. If you want to know how fast is your website, this tool really comes in handy. Besides analyzing, it helps you to optimize your site speed for free. This tool can also get your web’s page load time, total page size, and total requests. You can test your page in different countries, browsers, connection speeds and so much more.
If you wonder why your site speed is slow, don’t worry. GTmetrix will give you a detailed report of your site’s performance score and suggestions to improve it. In addition, it will allow you to see how well is your site performance, compared to the average of all sites analyzed on GTMetrix. The monitor pages function can ensure optimal performance and keep track of how it is doing by running a test daily, weekly, or monthly. When your site is slow, it also provides notifications and alerts so you can know what happened and come up with solutions as soon as possible.
This is another tool for website speed optimization test. By using WebPageTest, you will be able to run various tests ranging from simple ones to advanced testing including multi-step transactions, video capture, content blocking, and much more. It also provides useful diagnostic data illustrated by waterfall charts, Page Speed optimization checks, and recommendations on how to improve it.
Among free speed optimization tools out there, we can’t exclude the image optimization tools. This is one of the most popular tools for compressing and resizing pictures. It uses a smart lossy compression technique to shrink the size of your pictures effectively. This tool can help you to decrease the number of colors in the image to reduce the bytes required to store the data. Although its name is TinyPNG, it allows both PNG and JPEG formats for compression. Using this tool can be time-saving by letting you compress 20 images at a time. After you finish compressing photos, you can save them immediately to your computer or save them for later use in Dropbox. The effect may not be highly visible but it can make a huge difference.
This tool allows you to compress 20 photos simultaneously with the lowest file size. Optimizilla helps to reduce the size of images by using the combination of the optimal optimization and lossy compression algorithms to decrease both JPEG and PNG pictures. It still retains the quality required of the images. You can see the before and after versions to get a more lively view of the photos’ quality after compression.
This tool supports not only JPEG and PNG images, but also GIF and PDF. Besides compressing images with impressive results, it also helps to analyze your website and provide you with a report for later reference. ImageRecyle has a WordPress plugin, Shopify app, and Magento extension in order for you to get access to this tool easily without going to their website every time. Your images on mobile and tablet devices will also be optimized using ImageRecycle. It helps to reduce the image size, not the quality.
URL redirects
Redundant redirects can affect your site performance negatively. For Shopify store owners, you can use 301 redirects by the built-in redirects function called “URL redirect”.
For more detailed instructions, you can explore more at help.shopify.com.
As dead and broken links are really harmful to your site, find and fix those links are crucial tasks. There are several free tools for finding and fixing broken links.
SmallSEOTools’s Broken Link Checker
The last words
I have just introduced to you free necessary speed optimization tools to boost your site performance. Remember, using free tools might not solve all the site speed problems. That said, seeking advice from experts isn’t bad choice. HappyPoints is happy to help you as we provide a speed optimization service.
Need expert help on site speed?
