Check Your Site’s Performance (original) (raw)
A fast-loading website is essential for giving visitors a smooth experience and boosting your ranking in search engines. This guide will show you how to run a performance report on your website and get WordPress-specific recommendations for improving its speed.
This feature is available on sites with the WordPress.com Business and Commerce plans, and the legacy Pro plan. If you have a Business plan, make sure to activate it. For sites on the Free, Personal, and Premium plans, upgrade your plan to access this feature.
Test Your Site Performance
To test the speed of your WordPress.com website, take the following steps:
- Visit your Sites list in the dashboard.
- Choose your website.
- Click on the “Performance” tab to run the tests (this will take approximately 30 seconds).
By default, your site’s homepage will be tested. To test other pages, click on the “Page” option to select from other public pages on your site.
Understanding Your Site’s Performance Score
Your site will receive a performance score using Lighthouse, an automated tool from Google for assessing web page quality. The performance score is a combined representation of your site‘s individual speed metrics, which include the following:
- First Contentful Paint (FCP) is the time it takes for the first bit of content (like text or images) to show up on the screen after someone visits your website. The best sites have an FCP of under 1.8 seconds.
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) measures how long it takes for the biggest piece of visible content, like a large image or heading, to fully appear on the screen. The best sites have an LCP of under 2.5 seconds.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) shows how much your website’s layout moves around while it’s loading, which can cause things like buttons or text to shift unexpectedly. The best sites have a CLS score of 0.1 or lower.
- Time to First Byte (TTFB) measures how quickly your website starts to respond after someone clicks on it, showing the first sign that it’s loading. The best sites have a TTFB of around 800 milliseconds or less.
- Total Blocking Time (TBT) is how long your website is unresponsive while loading, meaning people can’t interact with it during this time. The best sites have a TBT of under 200 milliseconds.
Your site will receive separate performance scores for mobile and desktop. Click the “Mobile” and “Desktop” buttons to view your site’s performance scores and recommendations on each device.
Improve Your Site‘s Performance Score
After testing your website’s performance, you’ll receive recommendations for improving your site based on your performance score:
Click on a recommendation to read an explanation of the problem, suggested solutions, and a list of URLs affected by that performance issue (which could include image URLs or files). These recommendations are tailored to your website so you can take action to improve your site’s performance.
Visit the guides below to learn how to solve the most common issues that may affect a website’s performance:
For more information about how WordPress.com automatically optimizes your website for speed, visit our guide to Improve Your Website’s Speed and Performance. For developers, visit our Troubleshoot Site Performance guide for more technical information to resolve performance issues.