This tool uses an open source program called Lighthouse from Google to audit the performance of your site. It will give you a simple breakdown of how your site performs and how quickly it becomes usable to the end user. By using this test you can see how changes or optimizations to your site have affected its performance. Enter the URL you would like to test in the URL box below, Be sure to include https:// or https:// in your URL. This test may take several minutes depending on how many other tests are currently running.
What Does This Test And What Do The Results Mean?
This program will test for your Time To First Byte, Total Byte Weight, First Meaningful Paint, First Interactive, Consistently Interactive, and Speed Index Metric.
Time To First Byte: This is the time it took for the browser to get the first byte of the website. This time will vary greatly depending on the code of the website. Most common CMSs such as Joomla and WordPress having a lot of scripts to run in order to display the website which will cause a longer time to first byte. The best way to reduce this time is caching for your site. The Simplest way to test this to see if it is the code of the site that is causing the issue is to put a simple HTML file on your site and run the test using the URL for that HTML file.
Total Byte Weight: This is how large the response to the browser was. It is best to try and keep this as low as possible as larger sites will take longer for users with slower internet connections to view your site. E-commerce sites or sites with a lot of images such as art galleries will have a much larger Total Byte weight as they have a lot of images, This is not always a bad thing but images should be optimized if they can be.
First Meaningful Paint: The First Meaningful Paint is when the page first displays to the user, You may still have images or other resources such as social media widgets or ads still loading.
First Interactive: This is when your site is mostly loaded and the user can interact with the page even though some resources may still be loading.
Consistently Interactive: At this point your site is loaded and all resources on the page are fully interactive.
Speed Index Metric: The Speed Index Metric is a score given by the Lighthouse program, The metric is designed to give you a figure so you can compare changes later on. Lower is better.
Lighthouse tool
If you would like more details about the performance of your site you can install the Lighthouse tool into your browser so you can test from your computer. The full tool will give more details and offer suggestions on how to improve your sites scores. You can find the tool here.
