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One of the most targeted goals when optimizing a website for page load speed is to get a good score on Google PageSpeed Insights test. But it is not enough to work hard on optimization, achieve a good score and go to sleep. It is essential to periodically monitor score changes as a website evolves and undergoes changes over time which affect this metric.

Here’s a little script that will allow you to automatically track Google PageSpeed Insight score and be alerted if it falls below a custom value.

It is often common to embed a Facebook «Like» button on your website so that on the one hand you show the number of followers of your Facebook page and on the other hand you invite the user to click on it to start following your page. However, this type of buttons tend to overload a website quite a lot because they consist of Javascript code that dynamically generates the button with the updated number of followers and the functionality needed to give a «Like». This means that every time you load a page of your website you have to send 11 extra requests to the Facebook servers to download all the necessary elements. Given that these servers are currently located on the west coast of the United States and are not available through any CDN or similar service, depending on where the user is located, it is likely that each of these requests will have to cross half the globe to complete the download. All this causes your website to slow down unnecessarily and its loading speed is affected, which is quite negative in multiple aspects.

It’s common not to pay much attention to website loading speed as long as it remains between more or less acceptable levels wich don’t make us waiting forever for content. However, web speed is becoming an increasingly important factor and optimization efforts in this area can be decisive for success or failure in achieving our goals.

Below are the top 5 reasons why you should start worrying about website speed and page loading times.