How to Check the Speed ​​of a Website

It is not difficult to understand how to test the loading speed of a website. This article will provide you with some basic knowledge and teach you some correct methods.

The speed indicator is not a single

The first thing to understand is that there is no single metric or measure of “velocity”. There is no simple number that can be used to measure how fast a page loads.

There are many different stages and different parts that can be measured throughout the loading process of a web page. If the network connection is slow, but the images load quickly, is the site “fast” or “slow”? And vice versa?

Even if you try to reduce all of this to “time it takes to fully load”, it’s still tricky to define a useful number.

For example, a page that takes a long time to “finish loading” might serve a functional “lightweight” version while the entire page is still downloading in the background. Is this “faster” or “slower” compared to a site that loads faster but I can’t use it until it finishes loading?

The answer is “it depends,” and there are many different ways we can think about or measure “site speed.”

Understand the loading process

From the moment you click on a link (or hit “enter” in the URL bar), a process begins to load the requested page.

This process consists of many steps, but they can be broken down into several stages as follows:

While Google’s documentation might be a little too idealistic about the timing of these stages, the model is helpful. Essentially, the process can be described as three loading phases.

1. Network related

First, the physical hardware of your device needs to be connected to the internet. Typically, this involves transmitting data over transatlantic fiber optic cables. Here you are limited by the speed of light and the speed at which your device can process information.

This part of the process is hard to measure or influence!

2. Server related

The process is that your device requests a page from the server, and the server prepares the content of the page and returns a response.

This section can be a bit on the technical side, as it focuses on the performance of server hardware, databases, and scripts. You may need to seek help from your hosting provider or technical team.

We can measure server performance with tools like NewRelic or DataDog, which monitor how a website behaves and responds “from the inside”.

They will provide graphs and metrics around things like slow database queries and slow scripts. With this information, you can better understand if your hosting is compliant and if you need to make code changes to your theme/plugins/scripts.

WordPress also has some great plugins that do this kind of analysis – I’m a big fan of Query Monitor. This can be a good idea of ​​which parts of WordPress might be slowing down your site – whether it’s themes, plugins, or the runtime.

3. Browser related

This phase is where the page is built, laid out, colored, and displayed. How images are loaded, how JavaScript and CSS are handled, and every individual HTML tag on a page can affect load speed.

We can monitor some of these from the “outside-in” using tools that scan websites and measure how they load. We recommend using multiple tools because they measure differently and are useful for different assessments. For example:

• WebPageTest is great for providing a “waterfall” view of your website and how all the assets are loaded.
• Google PageSpeed ​​Insights is a bit simplistic, but it provides “real user metrics” for a website, straight from Google.
• Lighthouse for Chrome provides an extremely sophisticated analysis of your website’s performance and behavior, but it can be hard to digest!
• The Chrome Developer Console shows us exactly what’s happening when a site loads, on our computer and in our browser.
• The Speed ​​report in Google Search Console shows how quickly a website’s pages are loading at any given time.

These tools are great for spotting images that need optimization, slow-loading CSS or JavaScript, or places waiting to load resources from other domains.

Common Indicators

We still have some general indicators that can be referenced for all sites to optimize. these are:

• The time the first byte was received, the time it takes for the server to respond to some information. Even if you have a very fast front end, if the server is slow to respond, it will increase your website load time. Use Query Monitor or NewRelic to measure.
• First content paint time, which is the time it takes for key visual content (for example, a main image or page title) to appear on the screen. Measured with Lighthouse for Chrome.
• Interactable time is the time it takes for the experience to be visible and react to my input. Measured with Lighthouse for Chrome.

These are more complex metrics than “how long does it take to load” and, perhaps more importantly, user-centric. Improving these metrics should directly correlate with user satisfaction, which is very important for SEO.

You can read more about these metrics in Google’s documentation .

Combine the above into one process:

1. Use an “outside-in” tool like WebPageTest to generate a waterfall diagram of how your website loads.
2. Identify server and backend bottlenecks. Look for slow connection times, SSL handshakes, and DNS lookups. Use a plugin like Query Monitor or a service like NewRelic to diagnose the problem. Make server, hardware, software, and script modifications.
3. Identify front-end bottlenecks. Look for slow loading and processing on images, scripts, and stylesheets. Use tools like Google PageSpeed ​​Insights or Lighthouse for Chrome to get recommendations on how to streamline the way your pages load.
4. Use Lighthouse for Chrome to measure key metrics such as FCP and interactive time.

That’s all about website speed and how to test key metrics.