Run a Free Speed Test
Check Your Website’s Performance
Use These Tests To Check The Speed of Your Website
GT Metrix
GT Metrix is one of the most comprehensive speed tests out there. It scores your site from A to F (it even includes an “E” grade) and provides performance and structure scores. You can see right away what issues are causing performance issues on your website.
Page Speed Insights
Page Speed Insights is another tool that provides a lot of data on your website’s performance. The tool provides more data than GT Metrix and also provides mobile and desktop scores. The results on here may differ from GT Metrix as the tests are run differently.
How To Interpret the GT Metrix Report
The above screenshot shows a high-level report from GTMetrix for JVF.com. While The report was run on 5/3/2023.
There are a few things to look out for in this report:
GT Metrix Grade: Ideally, you want an A for your website and the two numbers to be in the 90s. When you run the report multiple times, you may see the numbers change. On rare occasions, the letter grade may change.
Fully Loaded Time: This is how long it typically takes for your website to completely load. Your goal is to get it to load in below 3 seconds, as Google did a study that found that 53% of website visitors will leave a website if it takes more than three seconds to load. Again, this time may vary slightly over multiple tests, but if you’re consistently seeing this number over 6, then you should address the problem.
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): This measures how the layout of the site changes during loading. An example of CLS is when you see a button on a web page that’s loading and the button moves as you try to click on it. This score impacts your Google rankings so you want it to be below 0.1.
The above screenshot shows the bottom section of the GT Metrix report. Each site will be different.
In the above example, there are five items to address. In this case, they are low because their impact is minimal. If you have ones labeled “high,” then they need to be addressed first.
Properly Size Images is a common issue that’s easy to fix. In this case, there’s only about 33KB of potential savings. However, we have seen sites where it’s been as high as 136 MB! To fix, simply pull the biggest images into an image editor to resize and compress.
Most of the other items require some working knowledge of how websites work, so if you have questions, please schedule a no-obligation consultation with us to explain how to fix it.