Our Blog Understanding and Interpreting Site Performance Test Results: Speed Tests, Stress Tests and Crawling Posted on 10.05.2023 Website Marketing Is your website performance hindering your site’s interactivity? Are hidden issues causing slow load times? As part of launching or maintaining a website and its SEO, web maintenance pros can perform speed tests and stress tests to provide baseline data and identify performance problems. Your site is always being crawled by Google, too, and you may be receiving notifications about performance issues. For these reasons, it’s a good idea to know as much as you can about site performance testing. Site performance test results can be overwhelming, as they cover several technical aspects, from site architecture to databases to plugins. Let’s break it down so you can better understand speed tests, stress tests, and crawling and how each affects your website performance. Jump to Section Speed Tests Speed Tests Stress Tests Website Crawling Interpreting Site Perfomance Results Fixing Site Performance Issues Speed Tests A website’s images, plugins, videos, and other dynamic content can bring a site’s speed to a crawl, which can drive away users. Speed tests will show you what is causing your site to load slowly. One possible problem: old plugins or themes that are no longer optimal for your site. Speed tests look for these issues so you can prioritize optimizing those items. This is important to SEO, as slow loading sites cause users to leave more quickly, which affects SEO performance. Speed tests are usually run when a new site is launched, but SEO audits also include speed tests. Keep in mind that it may be better to replace an old website with slow plugins than to try to fix or update multiple plugins. Learn more about the advantages of custom website design. Stress Tests Stress testing analyzes how your website and server perform under simulated high traffic and heavy user loads. e-commerce sites will need stress tests run on a regular basis — especially before campaigns or special offers are promoted. These tests are performed and monitored on the server side. Stress tests evaluate the website’s response and recovery and help identify any scripts that underperform or even choke when usage spikes. Any website with plugins, databases, and other technical integrations can avoid downtime through regular maintenance and stress testing. When a website is launched, an initial stress test provides a baseline of statistics for comparison of data as well as ensuring the site will perform as expected under high traffic conditions. Website Crawling Google is always crawling the web. When Metro Studios launches a new website for a client, we submit the new sitemap to Google, ensuring that is crawled and included in search results. We can also force Google to crawl a page for analytics purposes. In addition, when your web properties are connected to Google Analytics, you may see notifications or emails come through with warnings and error notifications. These could include the dreaded 404 error, i.e., “Page not found.” Critical errors like this one and user experience errors should be corrected. Other warnings you receive should be reviewed and addressed as needed. Interpreting Site Performance Results You don’t have to know much about site performance testing to realize that some results are more important than others. You will want to address any performance issues that directly affect your users and e-commerce performance. The user experience should be your primary focus, followed by SEO. Website testing and Google Analytics include a lot of technical jargon and details. If you have questions about site performance, contact Metro Studios for a free consultation. Are you a detail junkie? If so, you might want to do a deep dive on performance testing and reporting. Fixing Site Performance Issues Knowing what the site performance reports mean can be helpful to you, but fixing website issues is usually best left to professionals who are up to date on website code best practices. The Metro Studios team has expertise in website development, organic search, and digital marketing every day. A site audit is part of our initial consultations for redesigning a website or starting an SEO program. We evaluate your site and see how it compares to competitors, then develop a plan to improve SEO and functionality. Save yourself some time—leave the testing and optimizing to us. Contact us today.