Speed tests on servers overseas or in Australia:

We have found that opening a website from Newcastle NSW on a server in Brisbane and from Newcastle on a server in Sydney are both the same speed. But that from Newcastle on a website hosted in Florida USA the difference was 0.25 seconds slower.

This can be measured in the windows command box by typing “ping [domain name]” for each destination website.

That is not a large difference but where a web page is made up of many files including CSS, JavaScript, Images and included header and footer files they can all add to loading time.

Speed test of a website:

The speed of a website loading can be measured at http://tools.pingdom.com. When comparing two websites, enter each one straight after the other and in the settings choose e.g. “Pacific Australia Sydney” for each.

This speed test counts all the files making up the web page including CSS, JavaScript, images, included headers and footers, etc. It reports Performance grade, Page size, Load time and Requests. It makes suggestions to Improve page performance.

The wordpress plugin “Hummingbird” will help speed-up the loading time of your we pages. It will optimize your files by compressing them. This helps to improve site speed by de-cluttering CSS and JavaScript files, and by generating a faster version of each file. It will combine files to reduce the number of requests made when a page is loaded.

Speed test of your internet access:

When comparing two websites, each will contain a different number of Kilobytes, so divide the time in milliseconds by the number of Megabytes to get the comparable speed per Megabyte.

Speed test results can vary per day and per time of day. Internet traffic is a factor.
https://whatismyipaddress.com/speed-test will show Download and Upload speeds in Mbps (Megabits per second)

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