Competitor Speed Testing
At A2 Hosting, we strive to offer you the most reliable service, with the most innovative features, backed by an amazing support team all at affordable prices. You’ll also notice that we want to offer the fastest hosting possible. That’s because your web host has a direct, and significant, impact on how fast your site loads.
What Is Page Load Time?
Page load time is the length of time it takes for all elements of a particular page to load. This includes all of a page’s HTML, images, scripts, CSS and third party tools.
Why Is Page Speed So Important?
Your page’s speed has a direct correlation on your SEO rankings, bounce rate and visitor satisfaction ratings. Most importantly, your page speed impacts your conversion rate. The bottom line is if you have a slow website, you’re losing money.
In an effort to make your web hosting decision easier, we have furnished statistics displaying the page load speed for sites before and after moving to A2 Hosting from competing hosting solutions.
A2 Hosting’s Page Speed Methodology
The stats displayed on our site are the results of tests run with the 3rd party speed testing solutions GTmetrix, WebPagetest and Pingdom. A2 Hosting offers account migrations as a free service to our customers. Before migrating a site from a competing host, our Migration team runs speed tests with our speed testing solutions and records the page load time for that site.
Our Migration team will run the same speed tests once again after the site has been moved to our servers and it has been confirmed that the site is correctly pointing to A2 Hosting. The post-migration page speed results for that site are also recorded.
The competing host’s page load results we display are a cumulative page load average for all sites from that host before moving to A2 Hosting. The displayed results listed for A2 Hosting are the cumulative average page load time from all sites from that competing host after moving to our servers.
How Speed Testing Works
- Pingdom
Pingdom's Page Speed Check visits your site using an actual web browser to best simulate the experience of one of your visitors. Pingdom will then download each page element it finds on your site. This includes your images, scripts, HTML, CSS and external elements. It will then determine how fast your site will actually load.
- GTmetrix
GTmetrix is an online solution that analyzes website performance and speed. All you need to do is provide GTmetrix with a URL. GTmetrix will analyze the entered site and provide a report on the site's performance. In addition to determining how fast a site loads, GTmetrix also gives specific recommendations that can be used to improve the site's performance.
- WebPagetest
WebPagetest determines page speed by using actual web browers (like Chrome) and with real connection speeds from a number of test locations around the globe. Webpagetest results include page load time, time to first byte and Start Render times.
We tested our new Turbo platform versus our legacy Turbo servers to compare performance. We simulated real-world scenarios by creating a site using WordPress and WooCommerce. After loading 10,000 products into WooCommerce, we ran a number of benchmarks to act as users hitting the home page, browsing the store and adding items to their cart.