Check Your Website Performance
If your site isn’t loading quickly you’ll lose visitors and Google may give you less exposure in search as they’ve announced that your site speed is a ranking factor and they favor faster sites.
See below for a 3 minute runthrough video on how to analyze your sites with our two favourite testing tools.
While we demonstrate both the GT Metrix test (with the default test emulating a Desktop computer) and Google Pagespeed test (emulating the Mobile view of the site), we’ll typically optimize first based just on the results of GT Metrix test.
After fixes have been made we will then run both tests again. In most cases the issues will be resolved in both GT Metrix and Google Pagespeed, although sometimes there are “mobile-only” elements (usually images) that are still showing up in the Google Pagespeed test (which we then fix).
Please note:
- in the Academy lessons we only address the recommendations and fixes that can be reasonably addressed by someone who is NOT a developer. There may be some findings that you can’t take action on without a developer’s support. If you do all the fixes you’re able to and your site is still not doing well on the tests, you’ll likely want to consult a professional developer who is familiar with your website platform.
- regardless of whether you’re using WordPress, Shopify, Squarespace or any other platform, there will likely be some findings/warnings that are impossible to address with your platform. With this in mind we focus on fixing what we can and usually that’s enough to achieve reasonable results in the testing.
- the easiest fix is usually addressing image files that are oversized.
- the next easiest fix is moving hosts if you’re on a slow host, noting that this is not necessarily easy to diagnose.
- assuming you’re on a fast web host and your images are fixed, the biggest culprit in performance issues is usually adding too many plug-ins, apps, add-ons, images and/or video embeds. While these are easy to add, some are not very efficient when it comes to performance and adding too many can cripple your site.
Please not that this video shows how to run the tests but not how to fix the elemements that get flagged – we’ll address those in a series of videos we’re putting together.
