How to easily test your website performance

Google will help you improve your website

Everybody wants their website to look great and they spend most of their time and money on the design, logo and text. For a new business this is nearly always the wrong approach.

We a contacted by to many businesses that have a good looking website but are not getting many visitors. They wonder what the problem is.

A website speed rating and health check

Many people are unaware that there are simple ways to test how well website performance. One of the best ways to test your website is to get Google to do it for you. Google provides a completely free online website testing tool. Website designers will rarely tell you about this ;-)

To use the Google tool to test your website, simply enter your website address (URL) in the box below and click on the 'Show Google Rating' button. The test will take between 5 and 15 seconds and you will see a scores between 0 and 100. In the remainder of this article we will try any priovide a simplified understanding of the score..

What does the Google PageSpeed score mean?

For most small-to-medium websites the section Discover what your real users are experiencing will not show results, so we will focus on the section that says Diagnose performance issues (see Image 2). Here you will see 4 scores.

Besides the scores, Google provides more information on what problems might exist on your website. The recommendations are technical and may be difficult to fully understand. Don't worry, the scores are all you need to get started.

You will have a scores for the mobile and desktop performance of your website. Following Googles mobile first strategy, the mobile figures are more important than the desktop figure, so we will focus on those.

Of the 4 scores, the performance score the main focus, but In general terms, this is what the scores mean:

• Above 90 - This is an excellent score, your website is probably amongst the top performing websites in the world. Nice!
• Between 80 and 90 - This is still a great score. There might be some things you can do to further improve your website, but you are already doing the right things, there is nothing that Google says you "Should Fix".
• Between 50 and 80 - You have some problems on your website that should be analysed in more depth. Fixing these problems will give a significant boost to your website performance and get you more visitors. However, if these problems are a compromise on essential features against performance, there might be valid reasons to leave the website as it is in order to support the features.
• Between 25 and 50 - There is no nice way to put this, your website is bad. If this website is just a hobby site, then maybe you should not worry. If this website represents your business, then you need to get it fixed.
• Below 25 - Websites rarely score so low, but we did once see one that actually scored 0 (zero). We'd be surprised if your website was this bad, but if it is you need urgent help.

Note: Google's page speed is not the only free website testing tool that we recommend, you can also get free detailed performance information from webpagetest.org

What does Google say about page speed results?

In the past Google had recommended that you ask your website developer to make a contractual commitment to a high page speed score. Currently Google only provides only technical documentation on the page speed results. Unfortunately, the Google documentation is not easy for the beginner to understand. .