A strong Nashville web design knows one of the highest priorities of a website is improving the site speed. With our group, it’s one of the first things we look at when making an assessment of a website. When a website loads slowly, customers will just leave without any effort. So, checking your speed from a few angles is key.

We’ve all stared at our screen waiting for a painfully slow website to load. Whether you waited or left the website altogether — your overall experience was likely tainted by the poor load time. Thankfully for customers, browsers have a back button and search engine’s have lots of results, so we don’t even have to worry about it. But as a business, you don’t have that luxury. Our Nashville web design group sees that customer luxury as an opportunity for your business to get above the competition.

When it comes to an e-commerce site, a fast website matters (a lot). When your website fails to load quickly: 

• Google may penalize your search ranking
• Your customers are less likely to make a purchase 
• Visitors lose trust in your website

How to check your website speed

There are many free resources online that you can use to test the performance of your website and determine the areas that you can improve. Testing from various sources will reveal slightly different results so it is important not to only check one source. Additionally, testing in various parts of the country can matter for e-commerce websites.

We recommend the following sites to check your website speed: 

PageSpeed Insights 

The first tool we recommend for measuring your website’s performance is Google’s PageSpeed Insights. Our Nashville web design team doesn’t believe this is revealing the entirety of what’s behind the curtain but Google does hold the keys to the highest volume of traffic, so it’s worth starting here.

The Below the main score, it tells you how long it takes for any text or images to load and then the total load time. There are sets of data to notice. One is a 28-day average and the other is the current score. When our Nashville web design group makes changes, we’ll take the speed in the current score. The other will change over time. Now to improve the score notice as you scroll down the page, you will see suggestions for how to speed up your web page. 

Our Nashville web design team keeps track of changes within Google’s algorithm and back in August of 2021, the Core Web Vitals update was released. This is a set of metrics of better weigh your customer’s page experience. This report will give us everything we need to know by looking at the Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) and the Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS). Basically, these numbers determine how quickly the page loads on mobile and how good the user experience is. Both of these scores should be in the green.

Mobile testing 

As you are looking through your data, keep in mind that Google puts a really high value on mobile website speed. Since most websites average 60-70% of traffic coming from mobile, optimizations should start there. This PageSpeed Insights tool will give you a detailed look at the performance of your mobile site. Starting with the LCP and CLS, you can speed the site up, improve your customer experience, and boost your search engine rankings.

However, if you want an even simpler way to get your mobile website speed, you can use their Test My Site tool. Our Nashville web design team might use this toolto look at a quick glance. It will tell you the site’s load time and give a few suggestions for optimization without bogging you down with too many details.

GTmetrix

GTmetrix is a free tool that gives you a score based on your website’s load speed and identifies specific ways to improve it. Over time, this tool has become similar to Page Insights but it’s still valuable because it offers a slightly different perspective.

Before testing your website, we recommend creating an account. This will allow you to customize your test so you can get the most accurate results. Additionally, you can keep track of old reports without having to remember your before and after scores. Switching locations to measure your site speed across the country is another great benefit.

We recommend customizing your: 

• Location (based on where your server is located)
• Browser
• Type of connection (i.e. LTE mobile or broadband) 

After you launch the test, you will see two different results categories: Performance Scores and Page Details.

The scores given are based on how your site compares to others in the past 30 days. A green arrow means that it performs better than average while a red arrow means that it is performing worse than average. 

As you scroll down, you will get into the why of your results. You will see a letter grade for each category along with specific areas where you can reduce the size of files on your site.

Note: Look at the size of the files that GTmetrix is recommending you condense. There may be some recommendations that are so small, it won’t make a difference if you condense them. 

WebPageTest 

WebPageTest gives you a series of scores based on the different components that contribute to your site’s load time. Underneath your score, you’ll see the load time from the first byte to the full page content. 

As you scroll down the page, you will also see a waterfall view, connection view and request details for your site. 

Benefits of using WebPage Test include: 

• Test location feature so you can test closer to your target audience
• Capture video option that allows you see the site load from your visitor’s point of view 
• First Byte Time to show you how quickly your server (not just the website code) delivers content
• Waterfall view that displays which assets on your website take the longest to load and block it from fully loading

When you are testing site speed, we recommend using a variety of tools to determine how your site is performing. Each resource we’ve shared measures your site differently.

Using these tools together will paint a full picture of your site’s performance. It will also give you a better idea of what your priorities should be. 

Next steps to better website performance 

Running diagnostic tests is only the first step in getting your site up to speed. To learn more about how to improve your website performance, read our Magento blog or WordPress blog.
We also offer free consultations to help you identify ways to improve your site. You can schedule your consultation here.