Your website, and most notably your homepage, needs to load for each user, as quickly as possible. But how does it do that, and how can you tell if yours loads quick.
There are a few good ways to do it. One cheap way is GT Metrix, which is free.
You can do it on their homepage, tho that shows results using a Canada Server – which won’t be accurate speed for UK. Distance DOES in fact play a part in millisecond.
Get yourself a free account, and then you can test it on London servers.
To give you some idea, which is what ours shows on 27th May 2023.
Things can can cause pain to this, are improper image sizes, improper image formats, server speed and performance, lack of caching, and so much more.
No two Tests will produce the same result as it is down to networks and all manner of issues, but it should always be roughly the same.
This is an example of a bad report. We have of course hidden the URL for privacy reasons. But we can tell you the report showed:
6.8s server response time
A vast mass of CSS loading
2.4MB of images loading, on a page that has only a few.
The major problem with this website looks to be the hosting quality. Whether it is shared and shared-RAM as well, we don’t know. But it is not good.
So how can these kinds of issues be resolved?
First task, get in touch with a designer, like us here at 79DESIGN. We would need some form of access to your website, to see what tools are on there. Then we can delve in for a closer look.
How can you increase your page speed?
Better hosting. We can, if your site is WordPress and not overly huge, migrate it to our server to see if it is quicker with us. If it is, we would charge you for hosting, and other fees that we would discuss with you. But we would also look at the setup, to see if your website is configured correctly, even at the most basic form.
How can you improve your GT Metrix Score?
See above about Page Speed – hosting is usually the top reason, then cache and image sizing. These are the biggest issues we come across that cause such things to happen.
What about your mobile score?
This is where things get a little tricky. You will rarely find a website that has a super high Mobile Score with Google – they use Page Speed Insights: https://pagespeed.web.dev/
Because a mobile device will always be a little slow than a big desktop machine, no matter what your device, the results will never been as fast. Look at websites like the BBC or even Apple! Their Desktop speeds are good. Mobile is not good. Usually the “Performance” speed of around 40-60 is (for us at least) considered very good. The rest, should all be 92-100%. Some factors can prevent a full 100%, such as if you have external tools on your site, like Livechat, feeds etc. They can hinder it a little.
Your Desktop Google Page Speed score should however be a good 70%… or even in the 90s. At least checking, our was 100%.
Obviously this is not the “be all and end all to SEO”, as there are keywords and relevancy to each page. But check your website’s page score. Is it good?