Website Speed Test
to provide a good user experience
to provide a good user experience
How to improve page speed and Core Web Vitals?
How to interpret the page speed report?
The tool checks the Core Web Vitals metrics and indicates your page status with a score and a color:
- Red—poor
- Yellow—needs improvement
- Green—good
You can see the detailed results in the Lighthouse scoring calculator table.
All you need to do is paste your URL in the input field.
The tool will check the loading speed for the specified page. If you enter your domain name, you’ll get a report on your homepage.
The tool checks the loading speed for desktop and mobile versions of the page. If your page scores from 90 to 100, you have nothing to worry about. A lower score indicates that you should take measures to improve your site’s performance. If you need guidance on page speed improvement, use the Website Audit tool.
The website speed test tool also evaluates your page’s Core Web Vitals and shows the page size and the number of HTTP requests it takes to retrieve all the data needed to load and display the page.
Website loading speed is the time it takes the browser to load and display your page content to users. The tool estimates how quickly various static and dynamic elements of your page become visible and interactive. The speed score of every page depends on many factors, including server response, CSS and JS, media files, and others.
Low page loading speed harms user experience and undermines your ranking potential. Evaluating your site’s performance can help you find impediments for SEO and eliminate them.
Core Web Vitals help evaluate user experience. They cover three aspects of your site’s usability: loading, interactivity, and visual stability. They show how quickly the first render is displayed, how soon it becomes interactive, and whether any elements shift the page layout during loading.
Measuring Core Web Vitals shifts the emphasis from the time needed to load the entire page to the time needed to display above-the-fold content and make it interactive. This makes sense because users’ first impression about your site builds upon their experience with the first screen.
Since summer 2021, page experience signals have been ranking factors for Google. They include three Core Web Vitals metrics:
- LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) measures how quickly the largest visible content element is rendered. It can be an image, video, or text block.
- FID (First Input Delay) measures how quickly a page becomes interactive. For example, how soon the page becomes scrollable and buttons become clickable.
- CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift) measures how quickly the page layout becomes stable, that is, how long all visible buttons and input fields take their target positions.
First, page loading speed amplifies visitor engagement. The faster the page loads and becomes interactive, the more likely visitors will stay on it and perform the target action. If the page loads slowly, users will get frustrated and bounce without seeing the content.
Second, the loading speed and Core Web Vitals metrics affect rankings. Google strives to offer people resources they are likely to enjoy. Therefore, it gives preference to sites that load quickly and provide a great user experience, especially on mobile devices.
It’s important to monitor your site’s loading speed to address any possible flaws in your visitors’ experience. Our tool can check your site’s performance against valuable Page Experience metrics.
Your site’s performance depends on the device and internet connection of your visitors. First, your pages have different layouts and designs for big and small screens; therefore, you should test them separately. Second, the mobile connection is less stable in many regions of the world, which means your site can often load slower on mobile than on desktop.
Also, you should remember about Google’s mobile-first indexing approach. The search engine prioritizes mobile versions of your pages for indexing and ranking, so it makes sense to run a website speed test for this subset of devices.
Your page speed test results depend on your server capacity, hosting, image optimization, site code, and more. With so many factors in play, it can be difficult to figure out what slows down your site.
To improve your speed and Core Web Vitals results, you need to investigate what might slow down your website. Here are some basic tips to follow:
- Reduce the number of HTTP requests. Browsers load your pages by sending HTTP requests to the server. Every script, CSS, image, or plugin used on the page adds another HTTP request. To reduce their number, you should optimize your code by removing unused CSS and JS files, changing the order of file loading, using caching, etc.
- Optimize JavaScript and CSS files. Their size affects the website loading speed. To minimize the impact, you should compress them using special tools. For example, you can use CSS Minifier or CSS Compressor plugins for style sheets and JS Minifier or JavaScript Compression Tool for JavaScript code.
- Optimize your images. Images usually contribute a lot to overall page weight. You should compress them using tools that reduce the image file size without sacrificing its quality.
- Use lazy loading. This method allows postponing the loading of images and videos that aren’t used on the first screen until the moment when a user scrolls down to them.
- Choose fast server and hosting. Servers process browser requests at different speeds. The faster the server is, the sooner users see content on your pages. If your server is slow, check your hosting plan and consider upgrading.
- Use CDN (Content Delivery Network). CDNs reduce the load on your server. They store copies of your resources on their own geographically distributed servers. If you use CDN, browsers load the main HTML file from your server and all the secondary assets from a CDN server closest to the user.
FAQ
Site speed is the time it takes for the static and dynamic content of the page to be displayed. A browser sends a request to the server and receives an HTML file with the list of all page files and scripts that need to be loaded. The server parameters, page size, media files, and other factors define how long it will take to load.
Site speed affects search engine rankings. Google prioritizes user experience and ranks sites that load fast higher. Slow loading times may stop your pages from getting the top positions on SERPs.
Site speed refers to the average loading time for your site pages, while page speed measures the time it takes to load a particular page.
Our tool allows you to check the loading speed of a specific page. But if you want to check an overall website speed, you can test page speed for several sample URLs and calculate the average. In the future, we plan to add a tool to run overall website speed tests.
To test your page load speed on mobile web, enter a URL into the input field and put a check mark next to Mobile. The tool will display data about your page performance on mobile devices.
In general, the faster the better. The threshold page loading time is 2.5 seconds. According to the research made by Google, the majority of users won’t wait long. As the page load time goes from 1 to 3 seconds, the probability of bounce increases 32%.
Core Web Vitals are user-centric usability metrics that reflect visitors’ perception of your site’s loading, interactivity, and stability. They can help measure the quality of the user experience you provide and find opportunities for improvement.
Since 2021, Google treats Core Web Vitals as a ranking factor. The search engine uses these metrics to estimate whether a page provides a good user experience and is worth showing on the top positions in search results.
You can check your site’s Core Web Vitals in several ways:
- Analyze your pages using our tool and learn what you need to improve with our Website Audit.
- Check the Core Web Vitals report in Google Search Console.
- Use browser extensions that show Core Web Vitals when you visit sites.