Although this may sound obvious, many website owners are not aware of their site’s actual speed because their browser has a cached version of the site. When they visit their site, the browser presents them with a cached copy of the site. This is called caching.
The purpose of caching is to display a copy of a previously visited site. This allows the browser to load a site much faster, but it doesn’t provide the same experience and speed as a person visiting the site for the first time.
For this reason, many site owners are unaware of their website’s actual loading speed. Fortunately, there are internet tools that can provide us with real loading speeds for a site. Here’s a list of the most important ones:
By simply entering the address of our site, GTmetrix provides us with a series of ratings. We can see the performance rating as well as the Web Vitals rating (if your site doesn’t have a rating higher than 80, and Web Vitals in green, your site may have issues).
https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
This Google tool provides two ratings (mobile and PC), and the rating is on a scale from 1 to 100 (if your site doesn’t have a rating higher than 80, your site may have issues).
Google has announced that this year, it will take into account more speed factors for ranking in search results. That’s why this rating is so important. You can learn more about Page Experience: Google’s new algorithm.
The slower a site is, the more challenging it is to rank, and with less ranking comes less natural traffic. Currently, loading times are very important for sites looking to generate sales.