Testing

Disclaimer: always have a backup before doing any kind of optimisation to your website. Sometimes things break, so it’s important to have a save point to go back to.

If you’ve gone through everything in this guide and still aren’t happy with your load speed you’re going to have to do some testing to figure what’s slowing it down.

There are many tools out there to test your load speeds. Here are a few to get you started:

GTMetrix
Pingdom
Page Speed Insights

Our favourite method is to run the site through GTMetrix, then look at the waterfall, as this often highlights any obvious things slowing down the site.

For example, you might spot a plugin file that has a really long load time, so you then know you need to use a different plugin. Or you might have missed an image when optimising and you’ll be able to spot it in the waterfall.

When running these kinds of tests, don’t get hung up on the actual score as that’s not important.

The only thing that matters is the actual load time!

We’ve seen sites which have scored a C load in under 1 second, and sites with a score of A load in over 5 for example. Which site would you prefer to have?