Speed is one of the most important things for a WordPress website. First of all, speed is one of the significant factors in Google’s ranking algorithm. Fast-loading websites are liked by everyone, and people like to stick around with the fast-loading site.

If you don’t know whether your website is fast enough, then you can easily know it with a speed test. But if you don’t know how to properly run a website speed test, then you may get the wrong result and do the wrong tweaks to speed up your website. Therefore it is necessary to properly run a website speed test.

In this post, I am going to discuss briefly how to run a website speed test properly. After reading this post, you will be able to run a website speed test in the right way.

Let’s start, then.

Table of Contents

Things to do Before Running a Website Speed Test

Before running a website speed test, make sure you have the following two things configured and running on your WordPress website.

The first one is caching, and the second one is the Content Delivery Network.

Caching

Caching is one of the very important components of a website. If your website caching is disabled, then it might load slowly on the client’s device. Therefore, visit your hosting service and remember to turn on and enable the caching option.

If you don’t know from where to turn on caching, check hosting documentation or get support from them.

Content Delivery network

In 99.99% of scenarios, CDN has a huge impact on the speed of your website. Depending on the location of the data center of your website is hosted on and the location of your visitors, it’s been seen that CDN decreases load times by more than 50%.

Therefore, enabling CDN is a must. If your CDN is turned off, turn it on. If you don’t know how to do it take help from your hosting providers.

Properly Run a Website Speed Test

Now that you have enabled CDN and caching, it’s time to dive into how to properly run a website speed test. There are many tools that you can use to measure website speed. Here’s a list.

Google PageSpeed Insights
Pingdom
GTMetrix
Google Mobile Website Speed Testing Tool
Google Analytics Site Speed
YSlow
WebPageTest
DareBoost
KeyCDN Website Speed Test
Load Impact
dotcom-monitor
New Relic
Site Relic
Chrome Dev ToolsWeb Page Analyzer

For this example, I am going to use Pingdom, as it is one of the most commonly used tools. When you run a test,

Choose A Good Location

In the speed tests, location matters a lot. Almost all of the speed test tool allows you to choose your preferred testing location. If you choose a location that is far away from your hosting server, your ping rate will increase, and you may get a poor score.

This test is important from a location that is far from you, and that is close to you. This will allow you to see the impact of CDN on your WordPress website. If you wish, you can also disable CDN temporarily and re-test again to see the difference.

Make sure you are consistent with the location you choose.

Test Multiple Times

Caching makes a website faster. One of the big problems is people only run speed tests one time. The content that is not cached on the CDN or WordPress host appears slower. The same thing can also happen if you just cleared your WordPress or CDN’s cache.

Can you tell if your media or content isn’t serving from the cache? Well, every speed test tool shows you response headers or HTTP headers. Which contain important information about each request.

Now, take a look at the result. Your website performance will be graded according to your website’s speed.

If you take a look at the result below, you will see ways to improve your page performance.

Apply those tweaks and then again try the speed test. You will definitely see the difference after applying the tweaks.

What Might be the Cause Behind Poor Speed?

After having a speed test, the result tells you all the reasons behind poor website speed. Here, I am providing you with some common reasons and solutions.

Too Many HTTP Requests

Usually, a complex website consists of many requests. So, the more complex the website is, the harder it will be to make it load fast. There is a solution: reducing the number of HTTP requests. However, for this reason, it is not possible to cut off some functionality from your site.

Page checkers give one the number of requests; for some, it’s information overload to parse. Audit the design and functionality of your website by decreasing the number of requests for it. Before trying actually to optimize your website, here are some questions to ask:

Are all the media files uploaded on the website 100% necessary? Would their deletion or replacement substantially impact the design/functionality?
Is there enough whitespace?
Are you sure that all the installed plugins you have installed are useful?

Unoptimized Images

Images inflate the size of the web files and, subsequently, reduce the loading speed. A large majority of webmasters understand the principle of optimizing images, but they never practice it.

Fortunately, speed checkers point that out, and fixing them is relatively easy. Plus, a bunch of image optimization plugins are available in the WordPress repository, or you can do so manually using a tool like Squoosh.

Final Words

Understanding how to properly run a website speed test will help you to boost your website’s performance. If you run a speed test without the proper knowledge, you may learn in the long run. I hope now you will be able to run a website speed test properly.

If you face any problems, feel free to ask. If you liked the post, feel free to share it with your friends. And don’t forget to share your thoughts in the comment box below.

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