Website Health
Test Your Website Speed
Measure server response time, transfer time and page weight to see what is slowing your pages down.
Problem: Your website takes too long to load and may be losing visitors and conversions.
Test your website's loading performance and identify issues that may be slowing down your pages. We measure the server-side portion of load time: DNS and connection setup, time to first byte, and how much HTML the server sends.
What we'll check
- Time to first byte (TTFB)
- Total response time
- HTML document size
- Compression (gzip / brotli)
- Caching headers
- Number of redirects before content
What does a website speed test check?
Loading time has two halves. The server half is how long your host takes to produce HTML. The browser half is how long it takes to download and render everything the HTML asks for. This tool measures the server half precisely, and flags the HTML-level causes of a slow browser half.
- TTFB — how long the server thinks before sending the first byte. Above 800ms usually means slow application code, database queries or an overloaded host.
- Transfer time — how long the full HTML takes to arrive after the first byte.
- Document size — very large HTML often means inlined CSS, tracking scripts or an unpaginated page.
- Compression — uncompressed HTML wastes 60–80% of the transfer.
- Redirects — each hop adds a full round trip before anything renders.
Why is my website slow?
- Shared hosting with no server-side caching, so every visit rebuilds the page.
- Too many plugins, each adding queries and scripts to every request.
- Unoptimised images served at full resolution.
- No CDN, so visitors far from the origin pay the latency.
- Render-blocking CSS and JavaScript in the document head.
- Third-party scripts: chat widgets, tag managers, ad pixels.
How to improve website speed
- Enable full-page caching at the server or CDN layer.
- Turn on brotli or gzip compression.
- Serve images in modern formats at the size they are displayed, with lazy loading below the fold.
- Remove plugins and third-party scripts you cannot justify.
- Set long cache lifetimes on static assets with content hashing.
- Move to hosting with adequate CPU and modern PHP/Node versions.
What is a good website speed?
As practical targets: TTFB under 500ms, Largest Contentful Paint under 2.5 seconds, and a total page weight well under 2MB. Core Web Vitals thresholds are measured in real browsers, so treat the numbers here as a diagnostic of your server, not as a Core Web Vitals score.
How Zarivora can help
Zarivora optimises websites end to end — application, caching, images, and the hosting and infrastructure underneath — and maintains that performance after launch.
Frequently asked questions
- Why is this result different from PageSpeed Insights?
- PageSpeed Insights renders your page in a browser and reports Core Web Vitals. This test measures the server response, which is the part you control directly through hosting and application code.
- Does the test location affect results?
- Yes. Latency depends on distance to your origin. A CDN reduces that variance for real visitors.
- What is a good TTFB?
- Under 500ms is comfortable, under 200ms is fast. Consistently above 1 second usually means no caching or an overloaded server.