How do you know if your site is performing well?

What does that even mean? Lighthouse is a performance testing tool that measure your site for load speed metrics like “First time to Interaction”. Also, part of the test are accessibility how good is your site accessible also for people with disabilities and then also test pages for best practices on search engine optimization.

Stats relevant to your website’s user experience

  • 20% of US population has some form of disability.
  • You have only 3 seconds before a mobile user navigates away from your website.
  • 60% of user browse the web on their mobile phones
  • Google uses Site Speed as ranking factor
  • Google now only indexes mobile content for you website.

We will run a performance test on your site and give you the detailed report. The performance test uses Google Lighthouse tools and measures overall performance, accessibility, best practices, search engine optimization and PWA requirements. The last part is only interesting if you are working on a Progressive Web App or on a mobile first site.

Theme migration huge performance jump

Here is an example test before and after we made some site changes. We migrated a site from theme published in 2006 to a more modern theme and spruced up the home page navigation.

The overall score went from 71 to 76 so the old site wasn’t that bad. However the details show some astonishing outcomes. The overall Accessibility went from 74 to 96 and the SEO score from 69 to 100.

This was quite remarkable. After the first day, the site owner also sent me an email that when he searched his name on Google, he saw for the first time that his own website actually showed up before any of the social networks or news sites, which normally have a much higher authority that any single topic site. Once can not know for sure but with the SEO value going from 69 to 100 percent, I definitely wasn’t surprised by that outcome.

After a week or so, the site owner realized that we didn’t bring over the advertising he placed on his older site. When we added Google AdSense areas to the footer of the site, the performance went way down again. How disappointing….

So it’s not only important to measure the performance of your website and each single page, it also is necessary to monitor the performance over time, or at least test is again, after you make significant changes or start using 3rd party systems.

Image Lazy-Loading coming to WordPress Core

The biggest problem with page speed is image loading with the site. They are most of the time the largest files and many content creators don’t optimize images before upload and employ all kinds of additional plugins.

This month, WordPress core committer, Felix Arntz announced the feature plugin for lazy-loading images out of the box in core. Later this year, it is supposed to be merged into WordPress. We tested it on one of our non-optimized sites just be installing it and measuring before and after.

The changes in speed were quite remarkable! It went form 19 to 35 on the Performance and from 79 to 87 in accessibility.

Get your own test and recommendations

Interested in how your site might perform? Fill out below form and we’ll get back to you with your overall scores as well as the detailed findings and recommendations.

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Posted by Birgit Pauli-Haack

Since 1998 Birgit Pauli-Haack has worked with nonprofits as a web developer, a technology strategist, a trainer and community organizer. She founded Pauli Systems, LC in 2002, now a team of six. It is a 100% distributed company. Since 2010, her team has used WordPress to build new nonprofit sites and applications. In her spare time, Birgit serves as a deputy with the WordPress Global Community team, as a WordPress Meetup organizer and a Tech4Good organizer.