Website Speed Test

What output will the website load test produce?

The Website Speed test tool performs an online check and shows how fast your website loads in the user's web browser.

The Website Speed test is free and allows you to analyze a website loading process on desktop and mobile devices. It does not measure the overall speed of a website but rather the stages of the loading process individually. The speed test is based on the Core Web Vitals metrics, which is part of the Page Experience ranking factor, an analysis of the user-friendliness of a webpage.

Core Web Vitals are metrics that show how well a webpage performs - whether it's usable or not. In particular, there are three measurable metrics:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) reports the render time of the largest object on a webpage.
• First Input Delay (FID) measures the time it takes for the webpage to respond to the first user action.
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) monitors sudden shifts caused by loading new content on a webpage.

This checkup allows you to improve the performance of your website. Each test has a preliminary estimate of effectiveness - how many kilobits you can save if you take the optimization advice. If your website did not breeze through a test, it would be marked with a red cross. You can make the website more user-friendly and attractive to search engines if you fix the bugs and follow the advice for optimization.

What is a good website speed score?

Any website can be optimized according to these indicators:

• Loading start time - it is the time that passes between the moment when a user requests a new page and when a browser starts to display its content.
• Response time - it is the time that has passed from the start of loading a web page until an object responds to a user action - clicking, scrolling, swiping, and others.
• Webpage load time - it is the time that passes between the moment when a user requests a new page and when the browser fully displays its content.
• Content shifts - represent a coefficient reflecting the degree of webpage layout shift typically occurring when elements are delayed loading.

A website should immediately load on any device. Users should not wait! Slow website loading can harm behavioral factors: increased bounce rate, shorter dwell time on a website, and fewer pages viewed per session. This can affect your website's position in search engine rankings and your conversion rates and revenues as you lose customers.

On the other hand, the micro-optimization of all these factors makes no sense. For example, if a website is in the 'green zone', i.e., fast, then additional improvements that bring the total score closer to 100 points will not affect search engine attitudes and will not improve rankings.

Why is it essential to test the speed of a mobile website?

The website speed test for mobile allows you to assess how fast the website loads on different devices: desktops and mobile phones.

The search engine believes that a quality website should not keep the user waiting, so it penalizes very slow websites by pessimizing them in the rankings. Furthermore, Google uses the mobile-first index in its ranking. This means that the entire search output, including the desktop, is based on the mobile display of websites. In other words, if the mobile version of a website is very slow to load, your website will not be able to rank at the top.

Even if you think your website has no problems with the loading speed, it is recommended to check this with a website speed test to ensure that your website loads fast enough.

How to fix a slow website?

It would help if you found out why the website is slow to load. There are several ways of testing the loading stages:

• Checking for scripts, fonts, and plugins that can increase webpage load time (HTML, JavaScript, CSS);
• Search for images without compression;
• Time to First Byte (TTFB) test;
• Analysis of the total load time and page size;
• Checking the loading speeds at different user locations;
• HTTP header analysis;
• Checking the cache settings;
• Analysis of the lazy loading process of the elements;
• Check the output speed in different browsers;
• Network performance measurement;
• Checking the download of items from the CDN.

There are different methods to speed up a website. For example, setting up caching, gzip or brotli compression, optimizing the top loading process, code minification, compressing images, using asynchronous loading, and others. We recommend combining several methods for the best effect.

Why do some websites take a long time to load?

The website load test will show at which stage of the loading process there are problems and which method is poorly implemented or not implemented on the website.

The most common cause of download speed problems is a large number of media files that have not been compressed. Usually, the user can view the picture on the webpage without the highest image quality. However, inexperienced website owners upload original images in large sizes.