How to Test the Speed of Your Website

How to Test the Speed of Your Website

Welcome to episode 211 of The Determined Mom Show. I am your host, Amanda Tento, and I am very excited to be here to talk to you today about how to test the speed of your website. This is a very important metric as far as ranking on Google goes. 

The reason that you wanna make sure that you have a quick website is that Google is going to consider whether or not to rank your website. So if your website takes like six, or seven seconds to load, Google’s gonna say no. Thank you.

Actually, in preparation for this podcast, I tested my podcast website and typically it’s something that I do probably every quarter at least, and it looks like I’ve done some updates lately, and it is at 3.4 seconds considered a grade C.

So on a scale of A through F, I got a C for 3.4 seconds. So your website needs to be super duper fast. It needs to load quickly, the images need to be optimized. All of those things, and this is how you can go about doing it.

Step one in checking the speed of your website is to go to a website called gtmetrix.com, and this link will be in the show notes. It’s GTMETRIX.com. All you have to do is put in the URL of your website and then click test. Sometimes if there are a lot of people testing, it may take a while for it to load.

If there is not a lot of people testing, like I’m doing on the weekend, so there are not a lot of people using the website right now. It’s not in the queue or anything, it just got done right away. 

And very interestingly it gives you a lot of information, so maybe too much information for you, but really what you wanna see is your overall load.

You wanna make sure that your grade is an A and you always want it to be at least an a. B is okay, but really you want it to be an A because you want your website to be as quick as possible. So it’s gonna tell you some different things about what your website performance is doing. So first content, full paint means basically.

The first time that something is displayed that people can see, and then there’s a speed index, the largest Contentful paint. That’s the time that it takes the entire website to load. We have time to interact, which is how long it takes for someone to be able to use your website and the total blocking time.

And this is how much time is blocked by scripts during your page learning process. So if you have a lot of scripts on your website, it is going to be slowed down.

A second way to test your website is to go to pagespeed.web.dev and enter your website there. This is actually Google’s page speed insight. So this is built by Google and it will actually tell you your mobile speed as well as your desktop speed. So this is also gonna be a really important test for you.

To make sure that your website is optimized for mobile. If your website is slower on mobile than any other, and you get most of your traffic from mobile, that is gonna be a huge issue. So all you have to do is go ahead and enter your URL into the little bar that comes up and then click analyze. And then there are two tabs at the top after it loads, and it’s gonna have a mobile tab and a desktop tab.

So it’s gonna give you a score for both of your websites or both versions of your website because there are different versions, and it’s going to let you know what your performance is. So there are three different scores that you can get. Zero to 49 means that you really have a lot that you need to improve.

Then the desktop has the same score metrics. So it also gives you a lot of different scores to look at, a lot of different things to look at. Same thing with the speed indexes there. There’s also the first content, full paint, and the total blocking time. So all of that is there. All of those numbers we wanna see in green and not in red or orange.

I guess it’s yellow in color, so not red or yellow. We wanna see them all in. Now, if your website is not properly optimized, it’s gonna give you a list of things that you can do to optimize them. You could go through them one by one and figure them out. We also offer a service where we can actually optimize your website quickly and easily.

And it is probably a few days’ turnarounds, but we’ll go in and as long as you give us access to the back end of your website and your server, then we can go ahead and optimize a ton of different things and make it a lot quicker. So I’m actually gonna have my team optimize my podcast website because I see the performance has gone way down since I optimized it the last time.

And that’s something that can happen, your website is not always going to stay optimized if you add content to it, if you add pictures, and things like that. But certain plugins and certain strategies that you can use will keep it optimized over time. The whole point of this podcast was to help you learn how to test your website.

If you want, you can also just shoot us an email with the URL of your website if you don’t have time to do this, and we can send you a speed test report and you can just email amanda tdm-marketing.com and we will get that to you. I hope you have a wonderful week, and we’ll talk to you soon.