Pingdom Speed Test

There are plenty of website speed tests out there, some are better than others. Pingdom is one of these tools, this post explains how to fix some of the common issues it will highlight and how you can reduce your website load times.

Load the website above and enter your website homepage URL. You can also select where you want Pingdom to perform the test from. For the most accurate results pick somewhere other than where your website is hosted.

Reading the results

The first set of results outlines how the website performed overall. I've included a couple of example website results for comparison.

keithgreer.dev

Good Pingdom Result

The first result shows a site that has been properly optimised for the web. The page load time was under 1 second and required 11 unique resources to load the page fully. All the resources totaled 76.9 KB which resulted in a performance score of 94%.

example.com

Bad Pingdom Result

The screenshot above for example.com[1] shows the second website, which took slightly longer to load, but still under 3 seconds, the page required the browser to locate a total of 119 unique resources before the page was complete so a lot of the time taken the load the page was DNS lookups (finding the resource, rather than loading it). The site totaled 12.2 MB in size.

Improve page performance

Response Codes

Check the response code outputs. If the report is returning anything other than 2XX codes, check to see what you can do to reduce them.

Fix resources that return a 3XX response, these are being redirected and fixing them will reduce the number of HTTP requests the browser needs to make. Remove anything starting 4XX or 5XX, as they are not loading anything worthwhile.


1 not the actual example.com, but an anonymous website.