If you’ve been keeping up with SEO recently, you know Google was not messing around this summer. They rolled out update after update, from a multi-phased Page Experience update to two broad core algorithm updates, to a two-part anti-spam fighting update.
Now that’s been a minute and we can stop and reflect—how did you fare?
Did your site weather the storm? Fluctuate like crazy? Go down or up substantially?
There may still be ripple effects, and there will always be Google updates, but it’s time to do one important SEO task if you haven’t yet: evaluate your site’s most up-to-date performance and speed scores. This is simple—although I can’t promise it will be painless.
How to Check Your Site’s Current Performance
Below are three free tools you can use to check on the health of your site. First, fair warning:
- The easy part: plug your site in, and go.
- The harder part: Determining what issues actually need to be addressed (note: not all of them will even though they may look scary) and resolving said issues.
I want you to know what needs to be done now, so you can start having conversations with developers, webmasters, designers, and the other wonderful technical people in your life who we couldn’t get on without. You need to begin tackling issues before the normal Fall busyness makes introducing new initiatives a more significant challenge.
Ahead of the busy Q3 and Q4 season, it’s go time people.
Here are the 3 free tools I recommend checking
Pro tip: don’t just put in your homepage URL. Put in your priority SEO internal page URLs to see if they suffer from any issues your homepage doesn’t.
Love me some GTmetrix. A few of the things I like best are how you can compare competitor performance scores and the many tabs to review issues and how your site works. One of the things I like least? That you can’t evaluate on mobile unless you have a pro account. Boo. Everyone knows that Google now evaluates and ranks your site from a mobile perspective, not desktop. (Right??).
2. Pingdom
“Nobody likes a slow site.”-Pingdom
We’re right there with you, Pingdom. This tool is quick and to the point with high-level information, which may be all you need. It doesn’t quite give the detail though that other tools give.
3. Google’s PageSpeed Insights
And here we are with Google itself. I’ve had many developers tell me they prefer other tools and don’t put a lot of stock in this one. However, it is Google itself so it’s worth looking at. What I like about this tool is the ability to toggle back and forth between mobile and desktop and see what the different issues are. Plus, this tool gives specifics and details which may provide good points for discussion.
Jenny Munn
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