Speed of your website, how to test it

The speed of a website is not only important for the visitor but also for the ranking in various search engines. With a good score in various speed tests, you will not only have a better ranking but also a better conversion by satisfying your customers on the website.

A website simply has a huge list of technologies and third party resources that all need to be loaded on your website. To give an example of all the resources that need to be loaded, a typical WordPress website may use the following resources:

• - Google Fonts
• - Facebook Pixel
• - Google Analytics
  
• - Gravatar
  
• - Ads from e.g. Google AdSense or third parties
  
• - Other analytics tools such as Hotjar and others.
  

So you can see that a lot of different third party vendors can be loaded into a website. Using ads on your website can help you generate revenue with your website. However, they always make sure that a website is lagging. So take this into consideration when you are considering using an ad on your website.

The best way to test the speed of a website is to use different tools. Let's start with the following tools that you can use within your browser. To test these tools, we will be using a WordPress website on our SSD 25 hosting package. The default WordPress theme that doesn't use caching. And the only special feature is that it uses a MariaDB database instead of a MySQL database. Let's start with the various tests.

Google Pagespeeds

Google Pagespeeds is the score Google uses for your website, it clearly differentiates between mobile and desktop. An important metric in the eyes of Google. A website should not only work on mobile devices, it should load and use quickly. Google Pagespeeds, like all the tools mentioned, gives you tips to improve this. Here's how you can use them to improve your Google Pagespeed score. Below you can see the mobile test results:

And here are the desktop results, which even have the full score of 100 out of 100.

If your website has a lower score, it can be due to many reasons. So check out the tips and tricks Google Pagespeeds gives you here. For example, change your theme, reduce the number of plugins and remove unused code.

GT Metrix

GT Metrix has a comprehensive report that you can consider as a second opinion besides Google Pagespeeds. It is always advisable to test this alongside Google Pagespeeds on other websites to get a rough idea. GT Metrix has a comprehensive report with a waterfall that can be used to see exactly how a website is loading.

With a free account, it is also possible to test from multiple physical locations. Since we didn't do this, the testing is done from Canada, which also has an impact on website loading speed. This also gives you an idea of how a website hosted in the Netherlands will load abroad. Not perfect, as you can see from the result, but still in the acceptable range of 2.1 seconds until the website can be used. So it doesn't mean that a website hosted in the Netherlands can't be used by a user in the United States. Check out GT Metrix's review of MijnDemoPartner.nl below.

Pingdom Tools

Pingdom Tools is also an opinion that can be used as a third-party test for your website. With Pingdom Tools you can also use multiple websites without an account. And you can also easily see what exactly is loading with your website. With a speed test from Pingdom, you can quickly get an idea of how visitors in different locations are viewing your site. And how it performs. The closest you can get is from Frankfurt, Germany. See Pingdom's result below:

Testing Tips

When doing a website test you need to keep a few things in mind, first it is important what exact URL you are testing. If your website has a preferred URL, you need to enter it here. With an SSL certificate, this is often https:// or https://www This can also be without SSL. However, for any website, we recommend using at least a Lets Encrypt certificate. And for a production website, a paid certificate.

Also, make sure you are using the latest version of PHP in addition to the technology of the website itself. ASP.NET or .NET Core version. This also has a great impact on the loading times of your website. It is also very important that you use caching and compressed images. Images that are unnecessarily large for a website are a huge hindrance to speed. The same goes for ads or Google Analytics.

How fast is your website? Let us know via social media!