Welcome back.
So Google is all about great user experience and there's nothing worse than a slow loading website.
And because of this page, loading speed has been a major SEO factor since 2010.
The general guideline is your website should be loading below 3 seconds or you'll likely get an SEO
penalty.
So knowing this, we want our website to load below 3 seconds and in order to find out how fast or slow
our website is, we need to measure it.
So we're going to go into a site called GTI Metrics Dotcom.
Now this will be in the resources and then what we want to do is just grab our URL right here, mark
everything, then copy it, go back here and paste it in.
Now before I go ahead and click on Analyze, I just want you to know that you don't need to sign up
to run this.
You can run it straight off the bat, but if you do sign up, which is completely free, you get to
change the location of the testing.
So by default it's going to be using a Chrome browser and test it in Canada.
Now, I wouldn't change the Chrome browser browser because most people are using it anyway.
But if you know that you're going to get the majority of traffic from the US, or at least that's where
you're targeting, it's a good idea just to have a free account so you can click on this and change
it to the US because then you get a much more accurate measure.
So that's all there is to it.
Decide to sign up or don't sign up completely up to you.
At any rate, you can still run this.
So paste in your URL here just the way that you find it up here from your website.
And then let's check it out and analyze.
Okay, So here we are and we've gotten some results.
So first of all, we've got an A, B grade.
We would like to upgrade that to an A grade, of course, but this isn't what's the most important.
Scrolling down, looking at fully loaded time, this is what's important.
So we know that we need to be below 3 seconds to have the best possible user experience and not get
an SEO penalty.
And we're just at that threshold where 2.9 seconds.
So to understand what's taking so long for this website to load, we can check that out.
So if we scroll down, the first thing we want to look at is going to be the page details.
So as you can see, the total page size is 1.3 megabyte.
Preferably you want to be below one megabyte.
Now this might be okay if you have a fully loaded time that's lower and you still have a bigger size,
you're using more images, but we aren't using that many images.
So as you can see, the images are by far the ones taking up the most space.
So then naturally, the next question is what kind of images is it that's taking up so much space?
Is it all of the images or just a few that's extra large?
So in order to find out, we're going to scroll up and click on Waterfall and then we're going to move
over and click on images.
So looking around, we can see right here the sizes of the different images.
Now, the guideline for your images is that they generally shouldn't be above 100 or 150 kilobytes.
And as you can see, first of all, looking at this one, the clear review, it says here it's 65 kilobytes.
Now, that's fine.
It's not a huge size.
But if we go to our website and we scroll down and look at Claire's review image, it's a really, really
small image.
So this tiny image is taking up 65 kilobytes, which is pretty huge because if we go back and we compare
it to something else, we can see that the template mockup is 62.
So basically this little image is taking up as much space as this huge mockup image, and that just
ain't right.
So we want to make sure that we minimize this so it's not taking up this much space.
Okay.
If we go back and we have another look, we can see that the blog background is taking up 550 kilobytes,
going back and scrolling down.
This is the blog background.
So that's just way, way, way too much.
So by minimizing your images sizes, you get to cut down significantly on your loading time.
So that's exactly what we're going to do.
Do your own analyze.
Check out if you have some big images.
Most likely you're going to have that and then go into waterfall images and then find all of the images
that you need to be checking out.
So what I'm going to do is I'm going to decide that the clear review, the jockey review, and then
the blog background image, those three I want to optimize.
Now, even though the template mockup is almost as big, this is a very important image.
It's at the above the fold section.
One of the first things they'll see and because it's so big, 60 plus kilobytes, no problem whatsoever.
So what we're going to optimize is jockeys.
This jockey aims and clears review and then the blog image background.
So do your own analyze find.
Which images that you need to optimize, and then I'll see you in the next lecture.