How to test your site speed? A fast website is essential to user experience and search engine optimisation. In this short guide, we discuss what site speed is, why it matters and how to test your site speed.
What is site speed?
Site speed is how fast your website loads when a user is visiting.
Site speeds vary depending on a number of factors, such as the number of images on the website and their size, large pages with a lot of content, or special plugins or applications on the page. In some instances where your website loads slowly, it’s a user issue such as connection troubles.
You can test your website to measure its speed and also make changes to your website to make it faster and more accessible.
Why site speed matters
Why should you care about how fast your site is loading?
Slow site speeds don’t just hurt your users – they can hurt you too! Google can penalise you depending on how slowly your site loads.
Google aims to serve up the best results to users – that means results that the user will love and want to stay on – like fast and efficient websites. If your website isn’t user-friendly and takes a long time to load, you might struggle to get those all-important first-page rankings on Google.
How to test your site speed
When you think of testing site speed, you may be tempted to simply visit your website and see how long it takes. While this could provide an estimate, this speed could be influenced by external factors such as a bad connection, a slow device, or your browser.
Luckily, there are tools available that allow us to test our website speeds accurately without using a stopwatch.
Google PageInsights Tool
The Google PageInsights tool is a free tool created by Google that allows you to test the speed of your website.
The tool gives back a detailed report that includes details about how fast your website is on both mobile and desktop, elements that are slowing down your website, issues that require your attention, and ways to improve the site speed.
The Pageinsights tool is a great way to find out what is slowing your site down, and how to go about fixing the issue. This way, you have the best chances of improving your SEO and attracting potential customers.
Other site speed testing tools
If you’re not keen on using the Google PageInsights tool, there are other sites that you can use to test the speed of your website.
Tools like WebPageTest, DotCom-Tools, and SiteChecker Pro can give you a detailed insight into how fast your website is loading, and improvements you can make to increase the site speed and make your website friendly to your users and your SEO.
Feel free to browse the various site speed testing tools and pick which one is right for you.
WordPress Plugins
If you use WordPress, there are alternative ways of conducting a speed test right there in your WordPress dashboard.
The Hummingbird WordPress plugin is a site speed improvement plugin that uses asset compression, caching, code compression and minification, and more to speed up your website and help things run smoothly. Hummingbird also includes a free performance tester, which you can use to automatically test your website without entering your URL.
The plugin will conduct a website speed test via Google PageInsights and then save the recorded results within the plugin for you to come back to whenever you’d like.
Just like the PageInsights tool, the Hummingbird Performance tester will give you a score based on both mobile and desktop speeds, and it will give suggestions for speeding up your site. You can also view tutorials within Hummingbird just in case you get stuck.
Hummingbird provides a solution to a range of PageInsights recommendations, such as ‘Eliminate render-blocking resources’ and ‘Fix your JavaScript execution time’, which are suggestions that could trouble those with less WordPress experience. To save diving into the tech jargon and potentially damaging your site, let the Hummingbird plugin solve these issues for you.
Hummingbird was created by the team that brought you Smush, the image optimisation plugin. Smush allows you to compress large images losslessly, and serve them in next-gen formats like WebP, which are loaded and read efficiently by the browser. You can use the Smush free plugin to optimise up to 50 images at once or upgrade to pro to ‘bulk smush’ a large load of images with one click.
Not sure how to install and use WordPress plugins? No worries! Our ultimate guide to WordPress plugins teaches you everything you need to know.
