Let’s face it no one likes a slow website.  Think of how many times you left a site because it was too slow? Did you know how fast (or slow for that matter) your website loads is a factor that Google takes into consideration when ranking your web pages in the search results?

If you think your site is slow as molasses, then chances are your site is not living up to its full potential when it comes to search engines.  If you feel comfortable with the speed of the site, there are DIY ways that you can implement to give that site of yours an easy SEO boost. The faster your site loads, the better the chances of your site being found and a customer completing a sale or filling out a form.

Check out these two handy tools to improve your website load speed:

1.     Google Page Insights-

can be found here https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights

This tool will give you a page load score out of 100.  Sites with a load score closer to 100 load faster.  You can also review and compare your website load speed in comparison to other sites.  Most importantly you can view how well your site loads on mobile and desktop.   It will also give you a list (high priority, low priority) of areas that need improvement. 

2.    Pingdom Tools

http://tools.pingdom.com/

Here’s how Pingdom works:

• Examine all parts of a web page – View file sizes, load times, and other details about every single element of a web page (HTML, JavaScript and CSS files, images, etc.). You can sort and filter this list in different ways to identify performance bottlenecks.
• Performance overview – Pingdom puts together plenty of performance-related statistics for you based on the test result
• Performance grade and tips – See how your website conforms to performance best practices from Google Page. You can get some great tips on how to speed up your website this way.
• Trace your performance history – Pingdom saves each test for you so you can review it later and also see how things change over time (with pretty charts!).
• Test from multiple locations – See how fast a website loads in Europe, the United States, etc.
• Share your results – Pingdom has made it easy for you to perform a test and share it with your friends, work colleagues or web host.

One of the most common areas of improvement is the size of the image file you are using on your website. If you have any images larger than 200KB, they can usually be shrunk down without sacrificing the integrity of the photo. Try to compress them to a smaller size if you can or have a web designer help you.