If you have built your website and you have only seen how fast it loads on a new MacBook with a high speed internet connection than your testing has been inadequate. It’s easy to convince yourself that all of your webpages are loading well even when some of them are severely problematic. Your visitors will try to load your website on other than ideal conditions, and you need to see how your page loads under those conditions. You need to assess all of your pages, using speed assessment software in an emulated environment. And you need to assess your pages using real world information. This blog post will teach you the right way to assess you website’s page speed.
Assess Your Website’s Page Speed: Using Page Speed Insights
Google’s page speed insights is the simplest and most effective way to measure page speed. There are a number of different assessors on the market. But this assessor is free, thorough, and it doesn’t have any use limits. In particular, you want to pay attention to the difference between the mobile score and the desktop score. If your score is good on both (90 or better), and it is consistently good, then you shouldn’t try to beat yourself up trying to make it better.
If your score isn’t good on mobile or desktop, then you may want to ask yourself if it is worth the time and effort to improve it. Even perfect scores will recommend improvements.
Assess Your Website’s Page Speed: How Good Should Your Page Speed Insights Score Be?
Getting a score of ninety or better on mobile on every page isn’t necessary. However, it is feasible, and it is ideal, if you are willing to make the necessary sacrifices. There are a number of examples where getting a higher score is feasible if you put in the work, but the work is non-trivial. An example of this is loading your fonts through the Cloudflare CDN instead of the Google fonts CDN. Another example of something that will slow down page speed is the use of video. How you use the video and where the video is loading can create distinct performance results.
Using Page Speed Insights to Improve Your Performance
Google page speed insights will give you a number of recommendations for how to improve your page speed. But you shouldn’t expect to need to make every improvement. A lot of things that make a webpage cool can also slow down its load time. So you should use page speed insights to get your page speed to a load time that is consistently reasonable.
Focus on the page speed opportunities and diagnostics that have the highest performance impact. You don’t have to fulfill every requirement. Just keep going until you get a satisfactory score. If you can’t figure out how to improve each score, then you should consider hiring a professional.
Assess Your Website’s Page Speed: Using Cloudflare Web Analytics
Using Cloudflare Web Analytics is a great way to see how well your pages are running in real browsing environments right now. It will require you to sign up for Cloudflare, but this is highly recommended anyway to improve your page speed. Once you have signed up, setting up the evaluation is easy.
When you are looking at your core web vitals make sure that you have a significant number of visits and page views. You want to make sure that you have enough use cases that you can see a wide variety of results. Set the previous time span to somewhere between a week and a month. Usually the longer the time span, the more accurate the results.
You need to make sure that the results are coming back with a score of good (green) most of the time. You can hover over each core web vital color to see what the percentage value is for each score.
How Good Should Your Cloudflare Web Analytics Score Be?
You shouldn’t expect all of your pages to load well all of the time. If you have speed scores that are considered good at least seventy five percent of the time, you are performing adequately. If you are getting scores of good ninety percent of the time or greater, than you are performing excellent.
Assess Your Website’s Page Speed: Have a Professional Look at Your Site
Is your page speed score worse than it ought to be? Then maybe you should have a pro take a look at it. Sometimes when people build a website they just get lucky and they create it in a way that it loads well without any creative thought. But if you keep making improvements and your score speed isn’t improving, then you need to think about bringing in someone with more experience to your site.
Assess Your Website’s Page Speed: Questions?
If you have any questions, then please post them in the comments section.