Understanding Website Performance Tests

If your website is serving its purpose — driving leads and improving sales for your business while making you an authority in your industry — then it has to be accessible. And to be accessible, people have to be able to see it — quickly.

According to a KissMetrics survey, 40% of website visitors will not wait more than three seconds for a page to load, and nearly half of online consumers expect a webpage to load in two seconds or less.

We keep an eye on metrics like loading times for some of our website maintenance clients, but we thought it would be a good idea to introduce you to some of the behind-the-scenes tools that we (and you!) can use to monitor and improve your site’s performance.

Performance Measuring Tools

YSlow

As explained by Speed Awareness Month, YSlow inspects all the components on a page — HTML, scripts, images, etc. — and gives you a list of results. At the top there’s an overall grade of the whole page. It tells you immediately if you have an opportunity to make this page faster.

Wired notes that some of YSlow’s results should be obvious and already put in place by your website administrator. Other techniques YSlow uses, however, can make a notable difference.

It’s important to keep in mind that YSlow looks at everything from an optimization-focused lens. If your site has a lot of content or custom coding, that might slow down load times, but provide a key component of your user experience. Once you start looking into the details of optimization, it’s easy to get lost down that rabbit hole. Don’t fall into the trap of chasing a 100% perfect performance — this is just one ingredient among many.

Google PageSpeed

According to Google’s PageSpeed FAQ, the system analyzes the content of a web page and generates suggestions to make that page faster. PageSpeed offers both desktop and mobile analysis based on general principles of web page performance.

After analyzing a given page, PageSpeed gives a general score, suggests specific techniques for implementing 'rules' that speed up page load time, and provides some automatic optimization of external resources like JavaScript and images.

Google PageSpeed Insight Rules include:

• Avoid landing page redirects
• Enable compression
• Improve server response time
• Leverage browser caching
• Minify resources
• Optimize images
• Optimize CSS Delivery
• Prioritize visible content

Google’s PageSpeed scores don’t actually reflect the your page’s loading time. Instead, they indicate "how much faster a page could be." For example, if a website scores a 73, that means the website’s performance could potentially increase by about another third.

As Tech Republic says, just because Google says "jump" may not mean you necessarily should. If your web page is set up in a certain way to optimize your user experience, optimizing one setting might cause others to deteriorate. Always test any changes in development before applying them to production.

In short, it’s important to be aware of the tools your maintenance partner is using and how they are making your site better — but don’t get caught up in chasing performance numbers at the cost of your site’s usability.