Many people are inspired to make their websites faster, which is excellent news.
We need faster and more optimized websites. However, I also see a lot of people stop at the homepage.
They ensure the homepage gets a decent score and then totally forget to test additional pages.
Why does it matter
Looking at my blog, the homepage is only 1% of the entries to my website. That means 99% of the people enter through a different path.
So why should we focus on making the homepage faster if it isn't even the primary traffic source?
You might think, well, that might be your website, even if you are right. I would love to hope that people explore your website beyond the homepage.
But my site is massive!
My website, for instance, has 9xx pages at the moment, and trust me, I don't want to try to speedtest them all.
There is no need for that even. So what can you do to ensure the majority of your pages work.
Here are some tips.
- Identify unique pages and test those
- Pick your most visited pages
- Pick your largest pages
These are some samples that I use. Since optimizing your website is a recurring task, I like to mix these methods a bit.
Sometimes I check my analytics and see my most viewed pages, which have the highest impact.
Other times I pick the ones with the most elements of content in it.
And when starting a project, you might want to test all the different pages you have. Such as contact, about, blog-article, and so on.
Conclusion
Evaluate your website based on how users make use of it. Your homepage might not even be the main entry point, so ensure you optimize your whole website.
We looked at different approaches to test individual pages as it's sometimes impossible to try every single page.
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