4 Most Common Speed Test Your Website Mistakes

 

You conduct speed test your website and get good results, however, clients access your website and report slow load times or a high bounce rate. Have you been in this situation? In fact, you are making mistakes making wrong speed test results. 

4 Most Common Speed Test Your Website

4 Most Common Mistakes While Using Speed Test Your Website 

Mistake #1: Only Testing Desktop

This is one of the easiest speed test your website mistakes to make, which is why we’re starting with it.

While Google’s PageSpeed Insights give you both a score for how your website performs on both desktop and mobile, most of the other website tests check your site on a desktop.

However, that’s only half of the story!

One thing we can easily see is that mobile web usage has surpassed desktop usage, and this distance between them will be more and more big. 

4 Most Common Mistakes While Using Speed Test Your Website 

For this reason, it’s important that you test how your site loads on mobile devices with relevant connection speed. MySpeed ( https://gospeedcheck.com/ ) actually allows you to select specific desktop and phone devices so that you can see how your site loads on each platform.

While you’re testing on mobile make sure you also test your site on slower/older devices! Because not every customer uses the latest devices to access your site. It is essential to make sure your site performs well on all devices, even the fogy devices. You may be surprised at what you find.

Mistake #2: Only Testing the Default Location

It’s important to consider your testing location. For example, WebPageTest defaults location to Dulles, VA, while other services use their servers in Dallas, Chicago, etc.

In fact, speed test your website does not need to test from exactly where you want, it’s important to get as close as possible. If your website promotes a small business local to a suburb in Chicago, testing your site from San Francisco doesn’t really do you any good. Perhaps you run a business that serves many international clients. In that case, you need to be testing from the various countries that your visitors will be accessing from.

If you’re unsure of where your traffic is coming from, use a tool like Google Analytics and track it for a while. The ‘Audience’ stats there will show you where your visitors reside. After you have a better idea, then you can optimize your testing.

Sidenote – We just recently added a couple more testing locations, so you can now test your site from:

• Oregon, United States (US West)

• Virginia, United States (US East)

• Tokyo, Japan

• Sydney, Australia

• Mumbai, India

• Frankfurt, Germany (Europe Central)

• London, England (Europe West)

Mistake #3: Providing an Inaccessible URL

As you’re looking at the results of your audit, be sure you’re actually looking at the results of the page, not of an error page. This can occur when trying to test a page behind a firewall, or a website you’re building on a local machine.

Most often, many users see this issue when trying to test a site behind a log-in screen. That doesn’t mean you can’t test a password protected page though! You will need to conduct some steps to be able to test that website such as implementing a little scripting. 

Mistake #4: Only Testing Once

Do you think speed test your website once is enough? Of course, it is not. It’s incredibly important to continuously be monitoring the performance of your site.

You may think there’s no need to test your site frequently if you’re not making changes to it, but it’s a vital part of speed optimization. 

For example, If you can set alerts if your site’s load time exceeds a set time, that time the owner of this site caught his mistake, and all was fixed. However, not too many tools have this setting. Therefore, if you hadn’t been using a service that continuously monitors the site’s performance or speed test your website daily manually, your site could have been loading slowly for weeks, increasing his bounce rate, lowering his revenue, and alienating customers

To sum up, the point is, there are many constantly moving parts to hosting and displaying a website to the world. It’s incredibly important to monitor your site and test it daily!

Conclusion

Do you know why speed test your website result is good but there are still complaints from customers? Let’s avoid 4 most common mistakes above to testing process effectively. 

Also see: What to do if your speed test result is not good?