Site speed can be an important search engine optimization benchmark, and it can greatly affect the amount of time visitors spend on your site. The faster your pages load, the better.  ITworld’s Jim Lynch shows us his top 5 free tools to improve your website’s page load speed.

“I’ve used some of these tools on my own blogs, and I’ve had great results.” Explains, Lynch. “My page loading times went from up to six or seven seconds down to one to two seconds most of the time. That’s a huge improvement.”

The official description of each tool appears under the link.

1. Google PageSpeed Insights

Page Speed Insights measures the performance of a page for mobile devices and desktop devices. It fetches the url twice, once with a mobile user-agent, and once with a desktop-user agent.

The PageSpeed Score ranges from 0 to 100 points. A higher score is better and a score of 85 or above indicates that the page is performing well. Please note that PageSpeed Insights is being continually improved and so the score will change as we add new rules or improve our analysis.

2. Pingdom Website Speed Test

We built this Full Page Test tool to help you analyze the load speed of your websites and learn how to make them faster. It lets you identify what about a web page is fast, slow, too big, what best practices you’re not following, and so on. We have tried to make it useful both to experts and novices alike.

3. Web Page Test

Run a free website speed test from multiple locations around the globe using real browsers (IE and Chrome) and at real consumer connection speeds. You can run simple tests or perform advanced testing including multi-step transactions, video capture, content blocking and much more. Your results will provide rich diagnostic information including resource loading waterfall charts, Page Speed optimization checks and suggestions for improvements.

4. GTmetrix

Studies show that users leave a site if it hasn’t loaded in 4 seconds; keep your users happy and engaged by providing a fast performing website!

GTmetrix uses Google Page Speed and Yahoo! YSlow to grade your site’s performance and provides actionable recommendations to fix these issues.

5. Web Page Analyzer

Try our free web site speed test to improve website performance. Enter a URL below to calculate page size, composition, and download time. The script calculates the size of individual elements and sums up each type of web page component. Based on these page characteristics the script then offers advice on how to improve page load time. The script incorporates the latest best practices from Website Optimization Secrets, web page size guidelines and trends, and web site optimization techniques into its recommendations.