Improve your website - 3 Measuring Performance

It’s been a while since our last article in our series on how to improve your website so a quick recap might be needed.

1. Optimise Your Images – The right size for the right place
2. The Need for Speed – Smaller and fewer is best

With this in mind, it might be useful to show you a quick way you can check on how any page on your website is performing and a quick glance at what you might find.

In our previous article in the series, we mentioned GTMetrix. This website can be used to scan any page on your website and give you an idea of where improvements can be made.
In this article we’ll look in a bit of detail at some of the measurements it can show.

Bad Performance Example

Here is an example of bad performance:

 

Performance Scores

This shows the calculated page scores with PageSpeed and YSlow. They both use a series of measurements and checks to determine the grade.

Page Details

This shows 3 measurements and you want these to be as low as possible:

• Loaded Time – How long it took the page to load.
  Try and aim for a loading time of under 3 seconds. If you can get it to load in under 1 second that’s even better.
• Page Size – How much had to be downloaded to show the page.
  The smaller the page, the better. By optimising your images and the size of stylesheets this can reduce the size of the page. This is particularly important on mobile network connections. We’ve previously seen a website with a homepage of 264MB!
• Requests – how many times the browser had to request information from the website. These would include images, stylesheets and script files but also (importantly) external files too. Some features added to websites (like Facebook and Twitter feeds) load resources from their websites. If it takes longer to download it from their website, this slow down your website.

Good Performance Example

Here is an example of good performance:

We Can Help

We include performance reports with most of our monthly support packages and monitor these to help customers keep the performance of their websites in top condition.

If you’d like us to give you some tips or help with your website please contact us and we’d be happy to help.