How do you check site speed?

0:00Why We Use Pingdom To Check Site Speed

Probably one of the most common questions we get asked is how do we check site speed, and what tool do we use. There's a whole bunch of tools out there. Our tool of choice is Pingdom, which is tools.pingdom.com. The reason why we use the Pingdom speed tester is because it gives us the closest real world speed test, the closest to the speed in the real world.

It also allows us to test from multiple locations, so we can test from Europe, a couple of locations in North America, and Australia. A lot of speed test tools won't let you do that, because they don't have multiple locations. We found it's the most accurate. There are other tools out there, but we found Pingdom is the closest to the real world speed test.

0:44Our Load Time Targets And How To Test

We have two different services, standard and business. For the standard Speed Fix we're aiming for an under three second load time, and typically sites will load around that two second mark, one and a half to two seconds, if they're on good hosting. For the business Speed Fix our target is under one and a half seconds.

Depending on how heavy the site is, and how many tracking codes, marketing codes and analytics codes it has on it, sites on the business plan will typically load in under one second. Quite often we'll get them loading in half a second, if the site has a good theme, only a handful of plugins and doesn't have a lot of images. So check out your site speed: go to tools.pingdom.com. It's probably worth running two or three tests to get an average, because quite often you might get one test that's a little bit slower than the others. Running a few just gives you a more accurate indication of your load speed.