Quickly Check Your Website Speed Like a Pro
Want to know if your website is secretly driving visitors away? With just a few free tools and simple checks, you can quickly test your site’s speed and performance—without hiring a developer. In this post, you’ll learn how to run your own DIY website performance check and discover what to look out for.
Website speed and performance aren’t just nice to have. A slow, underperforming website can mean lost visitors, reduced trust, and ultimately, fewer sales.
The good news is that you don’t need to be a web developer to run a quick DIY performance check. With the right tools you can get a good sense of how your site fares and where it could be improved.
Why Website Performance Matters
For better or worse, our attentions spans seem to get shorter these days. As a result, most people expect websites to load in a couple of seconds, especially on their phones and tablets. If your site isn’t meeting that expectation, visitors will likely leave before they even see your content or offers.
Moreover, search engines have been factoring in performance into their rankings. That means website speed influences not just the user experience, but all your visibility which in turn affects revenue. If they can’t find you, they’re not going to buy from you.
How to Perform Your Own Speed Check
There are various tools you can use to get information on your site’s performance. Two of my favorites are Google PageSpeed Insights and GTmetrix. Another good one is Pingdom Website Speed Test.
With each one you simply enter your website URL and within seconds you’ll get a performance score as well as recommendations for improvement. To be honest, some of it is going to sound very technical, but that’s okay! There will also be info on simple fixes you should be able to tackle right away. In the worst case, you’ll need to hire a web developer to help you get your site speed on track.
That said, here are two common and important things to start with:
1. Page Load Speed
Ideally, your site should load in less than 3 seconds. If it’s slower than that, large images are usually the culprit. If that’s the case with your site, you’ll want to make sure the images you’re uploading to your site are properly sized, compressed, and saved in modern formats like WebP. If your site runs on a content management system like Craft, your site should already be outputting optimized images.
2. Core Web Vitals
Google uses three key metrics to measure how users experience your site: Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Input Delay (FID), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS). Even small improvements, like prioritizing visible content or cleaning up unused code, can help improve these scores.
Next Steps
Running a quick check is just the beginning. Some improvements are straightforward and give you quick wins. Lasting results, however, generally come from looking at the bigger picture. That means looking at how your site performs overall, how it’s designed, how it’s coded, how it guides visitors, and more.
That’s why I put together a free resource: 8 Pillars of High-Performing Websites.It’s a short PDF that gives you a checklist for each area every website owner (or developer) should focus on, from technical performance to user experience, accessibility, SEO, and more.