There are free tools if you want to know how to check the speed of a website, such as Google PageSpeed and GTmetrix.
I’ve written this blog with non-professionals in mind. Before I get into how to check the speed of a website, you might be interested to know why an independent SEO consultant would provide you with this information?
I often smile to myself when I see or hear of people in the field of SEO that guard their ‘secrets‘. There are no secrets in reality, because there’s this big all-encompassing thing called the internet. It removed the black magic of many professions long ago.
However, I also find it interesting that anyone would want to keep publicly accessible tools away from website owners. Many think they’re giving away resources that they’d otherwise be paid for. In my experience, they’re often tools that result in website owners realising they need a professional.
One such area is related to website performance.
Why should you check your website speed?
If you’ve come here because you’ve heard that the speed of your website has an impact on your Google rankings, that is true. That’s not to say that addressing your website speed is going to get you to No.1 by this time tomorrow, but it is a factor that Google (and other search engines) pay attention to.
Search engines don’t want to send people to slow or badly performing sites. They want their users to have a good online experience. Google says it wants to send people to original and high quality content, but it also points out that the structure, reliability and accessibility of a website is critical. Take it from me, they really do mean it. If you have a slow website, or one strewn with errors, the chance of you ever receiving any Google search results that you dream of is slim to say the least.
Incidentally, whilst we’re on the subject of Google search results, if you dig into the topic beyond this article you’re likely to come across the term SERPs. It isn’t a particularly technical term, it means Search Engine Results Page(s). If you see “This site performs well in SERPs“, it is nothing more than a way of saying the website ranks well in search engines.
What tools do SEO professionals use for website speed tests?
SEO professionals use a range of tools for checking the speed of websites, but one of the most used is from Google.
Please bear in mind that many tools used for testing website performance are designed for those that understand the words, phraseology, terms and acronyms they use – so don’t be surprised if you look at the results and think “what does that mean?“. Both of the tools I’ve listed give explanations for the elements they show as issues, but they’re still not particularly non-tech friendly. However, the key is that you’ll get a general view of whether or not you have problems that should be rectified.
Google PageSpeed
Google PageSpeed is a staple tool for testing website speed.
One of the cool things about it is that it’ll give you a score (out of 100) for your website performance on both desktop devices and mobiles.
That’s because you might be surprised to hear that just because you’ve got a website performing well on desktop computers, it doesn’t mean it’ll do the same on mobiles. They’re very different platforms and Google looks at how fast your site is on both (and may well rank your website pages differently because of this).
How to use Google PageSpeed
You simply enter the URL (link) of the website or individual webpage you want PageSpeed to look at, and that’s exactly what it will do.
By the way, it lets you test any page, and not just the homepage of a website, for a very good reason – different pages have different speeds. If you have a page that has far more content on it than others, it might not perform as well. This is typically the case when a page contains a lot of images or videos. It usually means there is a lot more data to be loaded before a page will display in full.
What Google PageSpeed shows for my website
What you’ll receive is a screen similar to this (this is for my website, so please don’t be too disappointed if you get very different results):
It is rare to get a full set of 100 scores. You’ll also find that the scores are likely to change depending on when you run the test. If you have a website that receives a lot of visitors at a particular time of day, that’s probably the best time to run the test. You’ll receive a truer view of your website performance.
The traffic light system
Scores will be shown in Red, Amber or Green circles. They reflect the classic traffic light system in that a green light is saying all is good to go, amber says you should be paying more attention to something and red is telling you there is something you really need to pay urgent attention to.
The first score, titled “Performance”, is the overall speed of your website. I’m not going to go into the finite detail of the elements that give you the score you see. However, your hosting provider is often a factor in this. If you’ve paid for a budget or very inexpensive hosting provider, you’re likely to see a lower score. If your website is hosted on a dedicated server, costing a lot of money each month in a datacentre, you’re likely to see a higher score.
I have said “likely” on both of the above because neither guarantees a low or high score. There are lots of other factors related to how a hosting server is configured, but it is part of the equation.
Why is my website slow?
Just because your website is hosted on a super-fast server with Amazing Internet Providers Inc., doesn’t mean it is going to be quick to load or perform well.
The structure of your website, how well it has been designed, the thought that was put into how it loaded items on the page, the code, the platform it has been written on (e.g. WordPress, Shopify, etc.) are all very important elements that will influence the overall speed.
However, it could be laden with errors, overly large images that could be much small, large sections of code that could be made smaller or ‘delivered’ to Google in a different way and many other items.
I typically find that the size of files and placement of code on a website are major factors. People simply don’t consider them when uploading new imagery and some web developers simply want to get your site finished and don’t think about the impact of poorly written or badly placed code on your site performance.
Exploring what Google PageSpeed says
If you scroll down the results page, there are a lot of sections shown that give you indicators as to why you’ve received the Performance score you have.
For example, staying with my website, it shows this:
When you run the test on your own website, you’ll be able to see details for each of the metrics. It is common that the “First Contentful Paint” will be much longer than is shown for my website, in fact I’ll be extremely impressed if you have a website with a lower paint time.
In a nutshell, to remain non-technical, the contentful paint time means how long it takes to show your website.
The images at the bottom of the page could look very different on your website. They’ll obviously show your website content, but you might find they look like parts of your page rather than the entire page. That is because they’re intended to show the stages your website loads in, and how long it takes for each stage. This can be useful as it might show stumbling blocks, or the elements of your website that are the root cause of performance issues (but not always).
There are full explanations of every statistic on the results page, but again please remember that they’re not necessarily written with non-technical people in mind (Google are very poor at that in my opinion).
Be sure to look at the Accessibility and other scores
I’d recommend you don’t just focus on the Performance score whilst you’re on the PageSpeed website. The other scores, for Accessibility, Best Practices and SEO are important when it comes to how you’re likely to perform in search results. They’re all considered by Google.
I’m not going to go into all of them, but I felt I should show what the Accessibility score was for my website because it is the lowest of all the 4 scores shown:
Accessibility considers a lot of things that are often over-looked by web designers and developers. For example, how easy is the text to read? That could be based on the size of the font you’ve used or, as it is highlighting for one section of my website, that the contrast between a background and foreground colour of text isn’t sufficient.
Even SEO professionals get nasty surprises
This where things can get surprising, even for professionals. I wasn’t aware that this warning existed on my site until I wrote this blog! Indeed, when I designed the site I know for certain there were no accessibility warnings, so you can imagine my surprise when I noticed this.
However, I think it is important to be open and show you it. I could have opted not to go into the Accessibility section in this blog, but I think it is best to use it to demonstrate what can happen to any site owner.
You can dig deeper into the reason for warnings. When I clicked on the warning about contrast ratio, this is what it showed me:
The dangers of Apps and Plug-ins
Now, allow me to explain why this has really bugged me! This is all related to a “plugin”. Think of it as an App. It is a free app I use on the website to display a Cookie Disclaimer. In the EU, there is a legal requirement to do this (although a huge number of sites don’t). There are lots of free apps that you simply install on a website and then configure the text they display and the colour scheme to match your website colours.
I configured the colours on the Cookie app for this website – as far as I could. I vividly recall being slightly annoyed that I couldn’t select the precise colours I wanted for some very small elements of the app, and these are the items that are impacting the Accessibility score!
Even if I paid for the full version of the app, which I have no need for (the additional features aren’t needed for this type of website), I’d still be unable to change the text colour. It highlights the fact that the developers haven’t considered all the factors that their app may have implications for.
What will I do about the Accessibility score?
Am I going to find another app? Probably not. In truth, 92/100 is a very good score and if I upped it to 100/100 it is very unlikely to have any impact on my SERPs. Furthermore, the contrast ratio warning is something I have a few reservations about. It is very, very borderline. If it was a client’s website, I would act on it if they asked me to, but I’d probably advise that my time was going to be best spent on other work for them.
What is WCAG?
Incidentally, you’ll see the term “WCAG” used in relation to the Accessibility score. This means Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. Yes, there are published guidelines about this. It is important that everyone, be they visually impaired, hard of hearing, or have some other form of impairment, should be able to access content online. Google tests your site against these guidelines and if you don’t pay attention to them, you’re likely to pay a price in SERPs.
Is Google PageSpeed useful?
Google PageSpeed is an excellent tool. There’ll be some SEO and web professionals reading this that think otherwise, and they’ll cite other tools that are far better, but if you’re looking for general guidance in relation to the speed of your website, I think it is the easiest resource to use.
However, let’s take a look at another tool that takes things to a different level.
GTmetrix – a powerful testing tool
GTmetrix is a website based tool has been around since 2009.
It is astoundingly good if you want more detail and significantly better explanations, for both non-techs and professionals. I’m not saying you’ll understand everything it tells you, but it contains a lot more handy ‘tool-tips’ in my experience.
My recommendation is to test your website in both Google PageSpeed and GTmetrix. It isn’t a bad idea to get two sets of results and can often confirm suspicions or bring clarity to what you should be prioritising.
Testing my own website with GTmetrix
To be consistent, I ran my own site through GTmetrix and this was the result for my website homepage:
You’ll notice that the top right section contains a “Test Server Location” and shows it as London, UK. If you create an account with GTmetrix (free), you can set the location from which it tests your website. You might wonder why this matters, but it does.
Why change the GTmetrix test server location?
If you have a large amount of visitors coming to your site from another country, it makes sense to select a Test Server Location in that country, or the nearest to it. If you don’t, you might get misleading results and, as a result, false confidence.
I changed the Test Server Location to San Antonio, Texas, USA, and this is what the results said:
Why is the performance level different? Well, my website is hosted in a datacentre in the UK, so the London location returns a better score!
However, the performance is still very good and the time it takes for the site to load remains excellent. It is still an interesting factor that you should consider when testing your website speed. The feature demonstrates why so many web and SEO professionals love GTmetrix.
Where is your website hosted?
At this point you might be thinking “Where is my website hosted?“. I don’t mean the hosting provider, I mean the actual physical location of the server. Just because you’ve signed up for website hosting with a UK, USA or Australian company doesn’t mean that is the country in which your website is hosted.
Budget hosting packages often surprise you when you look into this type of detail – and you quickly find out why they were so cheap.
If you don’t know where your website is hosted, find out by using a tool such as Hosting Checker.
One caveat to give on this is about CDN’s – Content Delivery Networks. They help the loading and speed of your site and can show it as being hosted in another location to that of the physical server. Cloudflare is a very popular (and extremely good) CDN. If you want to know more about CDN’s, you can read their explanation here.
Digging into website detail on GTmetrix
If you scroll down the results page on GTmetrix, it reveals a wealth of information about your website performance. This is what it said about mine:
As with Google PageSpeed, you can see that it shows the loading of your website elements, visually, and the time it takes for each piece of content to be displayed.
It then lists Top Issues and you can click on each section to see what it refers to, along with recommendations for improving performance. Please don’t go through each of these sections and think you have a mountain of problems that need addressing. You may have, but GTmetrix is incredibly thorough in the elements it tests and makes recommendations about.
You’ll note it places a priority on the items it recommends you look into. On my site, they’re all marked as green but you may find amber and red areas highlighted in the same way as Google PageSpeed. I won’t be spending much time on the areas it has highlighted, but if you have any red areas please don’t ignore them. Had it shown me any red areas, I’d be looking into them immediately (and the same applies with amber areas to be honest).
The GTmetrix Performance tab
The tabs across the top of the metrics let you investigate more specific areas of performance that GTmetrix assessed. In this screenshot, I’d clicked on the “Performance” tab.
I didn’t click on this tab for the sake of it. I wanted to see one particular metric – “Time to Interactive“. If you hover over the question mark on that section, you’ll see why a lot of people like GTmetrix because of the explanations it provides:
This metric shows you how long it takes before the website reaches a stage that the user can interact with it. We’ve all visited websites that take a long time to load and even longer before they respond to you clicking on something. It is that interaction that this metric is measuring and it is very important in terms of the User Experience (technically known as the UX).
There are masses of other sections and statistics you can view on GTmetrix, but I’m not going to go into the details of them.
Is website speed important?
You now have two websites you can use, free of charge, to find out if your website speed/performance is holding you back.
Website speed is important. Looking into it means you’ve identified something that you know could be affecting your SERPs and, in turn, your traffic and revenues.
In my experience, it is one of the most over-looked factors about website design and visibility. Hosting is often the unasked question when it comes to owning a website. Web designers or agencies might sign you up to their own preferred host and that’s it done; there could be very little thought given to how it might impact you.
Ask questions about your website hosting
Ask the question – “Where and with whom will my website be hosted?” and then look at reviews and make them aware that you don’t want website speed to be a hinderance. Simply asking the question can often make them more cautious about the way they design your site, and they’re less likely to take shortcuts.
Be mindful of hosting limitations
If you’ve chosen a platform such as Shopify, there isn’t anything you can do about a lot of the data and recommendations you’ll be given by Google PageSpeed and GTmetrix,. That is because you can’t move from the Shopify servers and you have limited control over them.
Shopify (and similar platforms) present your site to the world in a way that works for all their customers (i..e. technically, you have limited control over the way a Shopify site ‘delivers’ the structure of your site to search engines, although there are some things you can improve on), so you’re stuck with it. They’re usually backed by very powerful servers, but there are lots of ways in which a website is presented to the internet that impact performance too, and Google PageSpeed and GTmetrix will highlight those to you.
Did this help you test your website speed?
I’m always interested to hear of experiences when it comes to website performance, hosting and anything you’ve gained from reading this article.
If you’d like to ask a question, or give me any feedback, please leave a comment.
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