| 🎯 What’s the goal? Find ways to improve your website loading time. | ⚠️ Why does it matter? Fast loading time improves user experience and is a ranking factor. |
| 🏁 What’s the result? You know which processes are slowing down your website and can prioritize with your developer an action plan to remedy these problems. | ⌚ When do you do this? Whenever your page load times are too high or ship a new page. |
| ✅ Any special requirements? The testing process applies to any website. | 🙋♂️Who should do it? The person responsible for managing your website. |
⏳ How long will this take? About an hour
Let’s check the performance of your website!
Environment setup:
- We recommend that you use Google Chrome browser to navigate the web,
- Administrator Access to your WordPress Blog.
Checking your website performance
Note that methods provided with this SOP will analyze only a specific URL, not your complete website. You’ll have to determine your most important pages (or pages that drive relatively big traffic) and then analyze each page separately.
Checking performance using GT Metrix
- Go to GT Metrix site.
- Simply type in your website URL and click on “Test your site”.
- The free version of the page won’t allow you to change the test region.
- You will be presented with your page’s score.
- Next, you will be able to see more detailed information, like “Fully Loaded Time” and “Total Page Size”.
- Click on “PageSpeed” tab:
- Here you will find some recommendations to improve your site speed. In our case, there are two red “grades” so now we know that we could be our priority problem to deal with.
- Now, click on the “Waterfall” tab.
- Here you will be able to track step-by-step your site’s loading process.
This is a good place for your website developer to analyze as it shows exact loading times of every element of your website.
- Here you can also check the “Status” codes of every action. Check this article to see what is the meaning of each of these codes.
Checking performance using PageSpeed Insights by Google
- Go to the PageSpeed Insights page.
- Type in your web page URL and click on “Analyze”.
- Wait for Google to analyze your page.
- Decide which report (“Mobile” or “Desktop”) you want to view and click on it. In this SOP we will analyze the “Desktop” report.
- First You will see your page overall score.
- Underneath you will see more detailed data. You can see an explanation by clicking on each of the categories.
- Below you will see your page appearance during while it’s loading.
- Then, you will be presented with “Opportunities” and “Diagnostics”.
- You can further analyze “Opportunities” and “Diagnostics” by clicking on “dropdown” next to them.
- So you or your developer can further analyze your page rating.
Checking performance using build-in Chrome tool
- Open Chrome in “Incognito mode”.
- Open the page you want to check. Then right-click anywhere on it and choose “Inspect”.
- The “Developer Tool” will open. Click on the “Lighthouse” tab.
- Choose the “Performance” category and “Desktop” or “Mobile” under Device. (For this SOP we will choose “desktop”).
- Click on “Generate Report”.
- This report will look a like a lot as the one you generated with “PageSpeed Insights” method, due to the fact that Lighthouse provides these reports.
Checking performance using Pingdom
- Go to the Pingdom website.
- Type in your site URL.
- Choose “Test from” place.
Ideally, it should be set as the closest location to your target audiences.
- Click on “Start Test”.
- Wait for Pingdom to run the test.
- Then you will be presented with “Your Results”.
- Underneath you will see more specific results.
Based on the results you can determine your actions to optimize your site
(resize images, change some redirects, change server).
Now you should check the performance of your page on a regular basis!
That’s the only way to remedy potential traffic jams!
