There are two critical things which can make or break your website. The first is user experience (UX) and the second is how well your site is viewed by search engines; master both and you should have traffic rushing to take advantage of the services you offer.

One way of mastering these two features is by making sure your website isn’t too slow in loading. On average, visitors will spend less than 10 seconds on your site before deciding if they want to stay or move on. You have that little time to capture an audience, which in turn means you cannot afford to waste it on slow loading times. Similarly, your site’s load time is one of the criteria that search engines like Google look into when deciding to rank it. The slower your pages load, the lower your site will rank.

Combining the two, you can see how important your website speed is, as it affects:

Your Bounce Rates: people will simply move on to the next page. No one really has the time – or patience – for slow websites.

Your Search Engine Rankings: in order to serve pages that enhance UX, search engines give higher rankings to those that are quick to load.

Your Page Views: with low search engine rankings, your page views will plummet – which in turn will affect your search engine ranking. It’s an endless loop.

Your Conversion Rates: if you don’t have people coming and staying on your site, you certainly will not have the conversion rates you deserve.

Your Profits: add all the effects mentioned above and, at the end of the day, the cumulative result will be that you end up with no money in your pocket.

So, now that we’ve cleared that up let’s move on to how you can check your website’s speed. Here are three tools you can use to do some in-depth analysis:

1. PageSpeed Insights: this is Google’s gift to webmasters and developers. The site measures the speed performances of both mobile and desktop versions of websites. It measures two load times – the time it takes for above-the-fold content to be fully rendered and the time it takes for the page, as a whole, to load. The higher the rank (out of a 100) a page gets, the better it is.

Users can measure load times using one of three ways: visiting the tool’s webpage and submitting their URL, installing the app as a Chrome extension or using the Insights API. After using the tool you will get an instant report on your site’s performance and recommendations on how to handle them.

2. Google Analytics Plugin: this is a Google Analytics plugin created by Joost de Valk from Yoast.com. As you might have guessed, this plugin was created for WordPress sites. Once installed, you will have access to performance reports which let you see your site’s speed, how its performance is when accessed using various browsers and its speed as it is accessed from various geographical locations.

3. YSlow: a similar tool on offer by Yahoo!, YSlow lets you run tests and offers you reports as well as recommendations on how to improve load speeds. You can make use of various analysis tools that are also on offer on the site as well as install a Chrome extension.

Now that you have the tools to find out how slow your site is loading, here are some ways you can improve it:

Large Images: this is the first and obvious culprit that causes slow websites. If you are going to use images cut the sizes down. Use PNG formats – they are much more compact than BITMAPS.

Too Much Advertisement: admitted, you do need to have ads on your website. That is one way of making money from the venture. But, if your ads are causing your site to lag, you should look into finding the middle path: how many of them can you have on your site before they actually start causing you to lose your income?

Too Many Gadgets and Plugins: here too, gadgets and plugins can help with improving UX, but there has to be a limit on how many of them you are going to put on your site before they starting giving you trouble.

Data Access and Input Forms: the time it takes for your site to connect to your database and then store and/or retrieve data will have a definite impact on your site’s performance. Look into all your database codes, fine tune them until access time is minimal and make sure you go back and forth between site and database as few times as possible.

Bad Hosting: when you have done everything possible to speed up your load time and find that you’re just not getting anywhere, you should probably look into your hosting provider’s performance times.

And there you have it, with a little analysis and work you can have a website that will be quick to serve your visitors … which is good news for you.