Performance
Does the site render fast enough to keep the visitor? How fast each page actually renders, measured in a browser: the speed indicators Google publishes and counts among its signals, page weight, and what slows the first paint.
Audit your home page for free
We look at your home page for Performance, and we email you our report within 48 working hours.
One page, one pillar. The plans cover the 9 pillars across your whole site.
What we look at
- How long the largest element on the page takes to appear, measured in a browser throttled to a phone and an ordinary network.
- Layout shifts during loading: content that moves under the finger at the exact moment you were about to tap a button.
- The stretch of time during which the page answers nothing because it is still running code.
- The weight actually downloaded, the number of requests, and how they split between images, scripts, fonts and stylesheets.
- What blocks a fast paint, what is neither compressed nor cached, and images served at a size unrelated to the user’s screen.
- The share of that weight and that wait which belongs to third-party services rather than to your own site.
On what basis
A finding is only worth something if it rests on an identifiable basis. Where one exists, we lean on a law, a standard or a specification, and for every point recorded the report names the page and gives the value we measured.
What it changes for you
Speed directly shapes your visitors’ experience. It is also one of the signals Google takes into account, without being decisive for ranking on its own.
It is judged today on a phone rather than on the computer where the site was built: that is where the gap opens, and the report gives both measurements.
What this audit does not say
Our measurements cover a property of your site: its weight, its request count, its execution cost. A 20-megabyte site stays a 20-megabyte site, whatever connection its readers have.
They do not replace what your real visitors actually get, on devices and networks we do not control. Where real-usage data is available, we publish it alongside ours. If the two diverge, the gap is itself information: a heavy site served to a well-connected audience still excludes those who read it on a poor network.
Every limit of the examination is stated in the methodology note of your report. A point that cannot be verified is never presented as compliant.
The weight of this pillar
An overall score has to weigh what matters for your business: the 9 pillars do not carry the same weight depending on what your site is for. Here is what “performance” represents in the overall score, under each weighting. The report always states which one produced your score.
| Type of site | Share of the overall score |
|---|---|
| Type not determined | 14% |
| Brochure site | 18% |
| Online shop | 12% |
| Application, customer portal | 15% |
| Blog, media | 16% |
| Public-sector site | 10% |