How to Check How Fast Your Website Is, and What to Fix First

A slow website loses people before they read a word. Someone on a phone in a parking lot gives up and taps the next result. You can check your own site for free in a few minutes, and this guide shows how to run the test, what each number means in plain words, and which fixes to make first.

1. 01

   Pick the pages to test

   Test the home page and the one or two pages people land on most. Each page loads differently, so a fast home page doesn't mean a fast menu page. If you have Google Search Console, its Performance report lists which pages get the most clicks from Google.

2. 02

   Run the test

   Paste the address into our free website speed test. It sends the page to Google's PageSpeed Insights, which loads it on Google's servers and reports back in about a minute. You can also run it on Google's own PageSpeed Insights site. Both use the same engine, but every run is a fresh page load, so the numbers can differ a little.

   Start with the mobile result. It's the stricter test, run as a mid-range phone on a slow mobile connection, and it's the closest to a customer searching from a car or a job site.

3. 03

   Read the real-visitor results first

   When Google has enough data, the top of the report shows how the page performed for real Chrome users over the past 28 days. This is the part that reflects your customers. Google's PageSpeed Insights documentation says a page passes the Core Web Vitals assessment when three measurements are good for at least three out of four visits:

   • Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): how long until the biggest thing on the first screen, usually the main photo or the headline, has appeared. Good is 2.5 seconds or less.
   • Interaction to Next Paint (INP): how quickly the page reacts when someone taps a button or opens a menu. Good is 200 milliseconds or less.
   • Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): how much the page jumps around while it loads, the kind of jump that makes you tap the wrong thing. Good is 0.1 or less.

   A small or new site often has no real-visitor data, because Chrome only reports on pages with enough visits. When a single page falls short, PageSpeed Insights can show figures for the whole site instead. If there's nothing at all, go straight to the lab results.

4. 04

   Read the four scores

   Below the real-visitor section are the lab results: one simulated visit, run the moment you pressed the button. They come as four scores out of 100. Google treats 90 to 100 as good, 50 to 89 as needing improvement and below 50 as poor.

   • Performance: how quickly the page appeared and became usable in that one visit. This is the score people usually mean when they talk about speed.
   • Accessibility: automated checks for problems such as photos with no description or text too faint to read against its background.
   • Best practices: checks such as whether the page uses a secure connection and whether scripts on it are throwing errors.
   • SEO: basic checks that Google can read the page, such as a title and a description. A perfect score here doesn't mean the page will rank.

   The Performance score moves between runs even when nothing changed, because each test is one visit on shared servers. Run it three to five times and go by the middle result.

   For a reference point, the Delta Medical Transportation site we built scored 99 for mobile performance in PageSpeed Insights when we tested it on October 6, 2026.

5. 05

   Find what is slowing the page down

   Under the scores, the report lists fixes, with the biggest estimated savings first, and our tool explains each one in plain English. These come up often on small business sites:

   • Oversized photos. A picture straight from a phone can be thousands of pixels wide when the page shows it a few hundred wide, and every visitor downloads the whole file.
   • The main photo arriving late. If the image at the top is set to load lazily, it waits its turn. Google's guide to LCP says never to lazy-load that image.
   • Scripts from plugins and widgets. Chat bubbles, review sliders, booking embeds and tracking tags all add code the phone has to download and run.
   • A slow server. When the first response from the server is slow, everything after it waits.
   • Images and banners without reserved space, which shove the page around as they load. Google's layout shift guide says to always give images and videos a width and height.
6. 06

   Fix things in this order

   Start with the changes that cost little and help most, then work down the list:

   • Resize and compress your photos. Save each one at about the size it is shown, in WebP or AVIF if your site supports them. Often you can do this yourself.
   • Make sure the top image is not lazy-loaded. In many site builders this is a setting on the image or in an image plugin.
   • Remove widgets and plugins you no longer use. Each one you delete is code nobody has to download. Ask whether the chat bubble or the social feed earns its place.
   • Reserve space for images, embeds and banners so the page stops jumping.
   • Look at hosting and caching last. Page caching or faster hosting can make a big difference, but it costs more and needs more care than the steps above.

   After each change, run the test a few times again and compare the middle result with what you had before.

7. 07

   Keep an eye on it

   Websites slow down over the years as photos, plugins and tracking tags pile up. Run the test after any change to the site, and every few months otherwise. If you use Search Console, its Core Web Vitals report groups similar pages, rates each group by its slowest measurement, and lets you start a 28-day check once you've fixed a problem.

What speed does for you on Google

Google says Core Web Vitals are used by its ranking systems, but also that it still shows the most relevant page even when the experience is poor, and that good scores don't promise a top position. Treat speed as part of a good visit rather than a ranking trick. The bigger payoff is the customer who stays long enough to call.

When to get help

If the top fixes in your report are about JavaScript, server response time or files that block the page from drawing, and you didn't build the site yourself, that is usually developer work. So is a site that stays slow after the photos are sorted. Our web development service builds sites that load fast from the start, and our post on the signs a website needs a redesign helps you decide between fixing the current site and replacing it.