We, at SEO Helpify, ❤ to help eager web developers & excellent bloggers improve their online prescence by providing free online tools & utilities.
This tool does what it says and it's done as soon as you can type out the domain name inside the input field above. Then press the big red & you'll be shown the size of that specific webpage, in an instant. Now what does this size mean? It means the size of a webpage's HTML, CSS & Javascript content, including images, videos, audios, and excluding external files (Files that are fetched from other servers).
What is a webpage load time?
"The time spent between submitting the URL to a website & that entire page being loaded with all its styles, scripts and content." - Kashan Ahmad from Devshot
There is a pun here, that you'll see websites having faster response times and slower load times. Wait, there is a difference?
Seems like it is and to state it in a single line, response time is the time it takes for a website to respond to a user's request. In other words, a website may be saying "Hey, I'm here!" while we won't be seeing anything because the connection is established but the content is being loaded from the servers.
Page load in terms of search engines
Search Engines have developed algorithms and softwares that rank websites based on several different attributes. One of them being the load time. To boost your ranking & earn more through more traffic, it's necessary to get closer and closer to the first page of the Search Engine Result pages (SERPs).
Why faster load times are necessary?
In the age of internet, where everyone possesses a 24/7 internet-connected device, where everyone browses the internet for one purpose or another, where 80% of the users have smartphones, it's quite backwards to have a website that loads slowly.
Think of it as waiting for your Cheese Burger at a burger shop, quite intimidating, isn't it? A survey states that 99% of the internet users leave a website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. With that being said, it's clear that everyone wants to make their websites load faster. Although sometimes, doing is a lot more head shaking than saying.
How to have a faster load time?
We, at SEO Helpify, wait, I'm not gonna say we love to help you with this because we don't. Our tools are designed for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and they're all free so that you can have tons of consumers of your content and the first spot in Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs). Although, following are some suggestions to have better results:
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Minification: This is the process of minifying CSS & Javascript files. It removes whitespace and converts formatted lines of code into a single line. CSSNano for CSS and JSMinifier for Javascript are some of the best tools.
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Bundling: A method that bundles multiple files into a single file that's called a bundle. Instead of including multiple files in a webpage, the bundle is way smaller and, hence, faster. Snowpack is one of the better resource bundlers out there.
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File Compression (Gzip): The process of compressing HTML, CSS, & Javascript files before sending them to the client browser is called Gzipping. It's done on the server side and GNU Gzip is a great tool. This, when combined with Minification & Bundling, results in the highest loading speeds of resources.
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Content Delivery Networks (CDN): Using a CDN instead of your own server can severely reduce load times. How? When an HTML page is received by a browser, it requests all the stylesheets (CSS) & scripts (JS) one after the other. Imagine the browser asking your server 5 times for 5 files, scary!
If there are links to CSS & JS files from different CDNs, the requests received by your server will be reduced, hence, faster loading.