#website #websitespeed #webdesign
Hello! Good morning. I’m David Grubb from Shepherd’s Loft Web Design Agency, and today I want to talk about something incredibly important for anyone with an online presence: analyzing your website. It’s all about “trust but verify.” Whether you’re building your website yourself or hiring a professional, you should always analyze it, both with powerful tools and a good old-fashioned visual inspection. This ensures your website is truly ready to generate leads and convert visitors into customers.
The “Survival Instincts” of Your Website: Protection, Rescue, Water, and Food
When I think about website analysis, I often relate it to Bear Grylls’ survival instincts: Protection, Rescue, Water, and Food. Let’s translate these wilderness survival principles into the digital world of your website:
- Protection (Security): First and foremost, is your website secure? This means having an HTTPS (Secure Socket Layer) certificate. If you don’t, your visitors will be warned away, and they’ll never even reach your content. It’s a non-negotiable baseline. Additionally, regularly updating your WordPress core, theme, and plugins is crucial for security.
- Rescue (Backups): Just like having a rescue plan, you need reliable backups of your website, both on your server and possibly off-site. This is your safety net in case anything goes wrong.
- Water & Food (Content): This is the lifeblood of your website – your content. This includes the words on your pages, your photos, and your videos. High-quality, relevant content is what attracts and engages your audience.
If any of these foundational elements are missing, you’re essentially throwing money away on advertising. Think about it: if you’re spending on Google Ads, Facebook Ads, or billboards to drive traffic to a website that isn’t optimized to attract, convert, collect, and deliver, then you’re simply wasting your investment.
Diving Deep: Analyzing Shepherd’s Loft with Free Tools
Today, I’m going to demonstrate how to analyze a website using free tools, specifically our own: shepherdsloft.com. The goal is to show you how quickly and easily you can verify if your website is prepared for success.
There are a few key optimization categories we’ll focus on: speed, mobile view, and search engine optimization (SEO). We want to optimize for humans, search engine robots, and even AI. Some optimizations are mandatory for success, while others might not be worth the effort or cost to fix. The key is to verify that your website is optimized, regardless of who built it.
Tool 1: Website Grader by HubSpot
The first tool we’ll use is website.grader.com, provided by HubSpot. I’ll paste in our website address and my email to get our score. This tool gives us a high-level overview of security, SEO, and speed, broken down into categories, along with an overall score. I love this because an overall score of 80-85 or better generally indicates you’re on the right track.
Let’s see our score… We got an 82! We’re just barely passing, but we are passing. Here’s a breakdown of the categories:
- Performance (22/30):
- Our page is super light, which is good.
- Page Requests (74): This refers to how many files and resources are pulled to build the page. While it suggests “serious improvement,” I think 74 is pretty good, especially since we’re using Divi on WordPress, which can be resource-rich. It’s about deciding if a minor reduction is worth the trade-off for features.
- Page Speed (5.8 seconds): This is not good. Even though our page is light, it’s not loading fast. This is something I need to investigate further. It’s like getting a second opinion from a doctor – we’ll use other tools to confirm this.
- Caching, Page Redirects, Image Scaling/Compression, JS/CSS Minification: All these are looking good, thanks to our caching tool.
- SEO (30/30): Perfect score here!
- Permissions to Index: We allow Google to scan our site.
- Meta Description: Keywords are properly included.
- Content Plugins: We’re not using any plugins that require browser installations, which is excellent for user experience and SEO.
- Description Link Text: This is crucial. Our links and buttons are clearly described, meaning the text accurately reflects where the link leads (e.g., “Web Design Instant Quote” button links to a web design quote page). This avoids confusion and improves usability.
- Mobile (20/30): This is a common area for improvement.
- Tap Targets: This refers to the size of clickable areas on mobile. While our main menu icon is large enough, the tool doesn’t specify where the issue is. My guess is that the text in the footer is too small, making those links difficult to tap accurately on a mobile device. This is something I can easily fix.
- Responsiveness & Legible Font Size: Our site resizes well, and fonts are generally legible.
- Security (10/10): Perfect score, which is fantastic and the most important starting point!
- HTTPS: We have a secure socket layer, which is a must-have.
- Secure JavaScript Libraries: All our WordPress components (PHP, core, theme, plugins) are regularly updated, which is crucial for security.
Tool 2: Google Lighthouse (Chrome Extension)
Next up is the Lighthouse extension in Chrome, which is Google’s own page speed tool. I’m going to set it to mobile because this is often more critical, as users might be on slower connections.
After running the report, here are the results:
- SEO (100%) & Best Practices (100%): Another perfect score, which is great!
- Accessibility (67%): This is low. I suspect the low contrast of some text (like red on black in the footer) might be contributing to this. There are WordPress accessibility tools that can help identify and fix these issues.
- It also highlighted that my viewport isn’t max-scaled and that some labels might be problematic. For example, a link to the “Gilmart Chamber” needs a closer look to ensure it’s properly labeled.
- One issue identified is that a heading element is out of order (e.g., skipping from H2 to H4), which an accessibility tool could also help correct.
- Performance (68%):
- Largest Contentful Paint (5.9 seconds): This is similar to the HubSpot tool’s finding, suggesting a slight slowdown. It highlighted a specific text area (“your business needs more than just me”) as a potential culprit. While it’s not a major issue, it’s something to note.
Overall, while there are minor accessibility and performance tweaks, no major red flags appeared that require significant overhauls.
Tool 3: GTmetrix
Finally, let’s look at GTmetrix. I find this tool often gives a more generous and arguably more accurate assessment of page speed, offering a third opinion to help us build a consensus on our website’s performance.
Here’s what GTmetrix reports for shepherdsloft.com:
- Overall Grade: B (83%)
- First Contentful Paint (1.9 seconds): This is significantly lower than what Google Lighthouse and Website Grader reported, which is excellent!
- Time to Interactive (1.2 seconds): Users can start interacting with our website very quickly.
- Speed Index (1.1 seconds): Another strong number.
- Largest Contentful Paint (1.9 seconds): Again, much faster than the other tools suggested.
GTmetrix also categorizes issues as “medium,” “low,” or “very low,” indicating that the problems are not as severe as other tools might suggest. The most important takeaway here is the fully loaded time of 2 seconds. This is well within the recommended 3-second margin, meaning I’m not overly concerned about our page speed, despite what the other tools indicated for mobile.
The Takeaway: Trust, Verify, and Optimize
The key takeaway from this analysis is the importance of getting a consensus from multiple tools. If you see the same issues cropping up across different platforms, then you definitely have something to address.
Ultimately, you want your website to be optimized for speed, mobile responsiveness, and conversion. This includes clear calls to action, well-labeled buttons, and a seamless user experience that attracts, converts, collects information, and delivers value to your customers.
Want Me to Analyze Your Website?
If you’d like me to analyze your website, I can do it in one of two ways:
- Public Analysis (Free): If you give me permission, I can record and post a video analyzing your website using these tools, sharing the insights with the world. Just leave your website address in the comments below, and I’ll schedule a time to do that broadcast for you.
- Private, In-Depth Analysis: I can also perform a more detailed, private analysis that includes a visual inspection focused on design, usability, and conversion factors to ensure your website is truly optimized to convert customers.
If you request a free YouTube recording, be sure to subscribe so you know when your video is posted! Thanks for watching, and we’ll catch up with you next time.