Measuring website speed

The speed of a website has a real bearing on the results it achieves. A website is, after all, a marketing instrument in most cases, and so it needs to perform at the highest level possible.

Is my website fast or slow?

When we deliver a website we always make sure it performs optimally, but that can change over time. There are broadly three reasons why performance shifts:

The website gets more traffic. More visitors arrive, which demands more capacity from the web server. More visitors is excellent news, of course — just make sure the hosting stays fast and always matches the number of visitors.
The content on the website changes. More content can slow the site down, but usually the delay comes from content that has not been added optimally. The person managing content within the business is often not an expert in this area, which is entirely understandable. Where possible, make use of the option we offer to place content for you. Depending on the website subscription this is often included at no cost.
The way speed is measured changes. This happens more often than you would expect, largely because web design techniques keep developing so quickly. Most of our website packages account for this with a periodic free update that brings the underlying technology fully up to date and optimised again.

How do I measure my website's speed?

Website speed can be measured in many ways, each producing different results, and each result needs its own interpretation. You can test your website with, among others:

Which score is good?

The score on any website is determined by many components — get in touch for a full explanation. A few questions we are often asked:

How do I get my website to a 100% score?
Optimal speed is relatively easy to reach by dropping the page design, not displaying the images and using no animations or special colours. In other words, the duller the page, the faster it is. That is not the point, obviously: the page speed would be optimal, but the marketing performance — which is what this is really about — would be very poor.

I see Google Analytics listed among the optimisations…
A website works well because a great many components are built into it. One of those can be measuring visitors, with Google Analytics for example. Switching it off on a page will certainly improve performance by around 1%, but then you have no insight into your statistics. As with every component of a website, it is a trade-off you have to weigh up.

The "Largest Contentful Paint" varies wildly between pages on my website…
The first or largest contentful paint is often an important figure, since it indicates how long it takes before a visitor sees a meaningful page in front of them. Websites today differ so much from one another (and rightly so) that it is hard for a computer to determine which content matters most for the visitor to see immediately. Loading a large image at the top of the page — or several images in a slideshow — may be treated by the testing machine as important, while the text above or below it is often more important. In that case the performance check can easily "count" several seconds more than it really should. On another page within the same website with no large image at the top, performance will look far better.

Comparing with other websites

Comparing with other websites is only meaningful when the purpose and the audience of both are the same. Comparing Facebook with Google is therefore completely pointless. Comparing two competing businesses, on the other hand, is genuinely useful. To compare websites properly, the contact page is usually the best choice: it is often an important page and tends to carry roughly the same elements. Another significant page works too, as long as both websites have an equivalent one — a quote request or support page, for instance.