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A page that takes a long time to load loses visitors, and Google ranks it lower. The Performance audit times the pages of your live site, says which ones are slow and what makes them heavy, such as large images, and tells you what to change. This guide checks Northwind’s live site, www.northwindroasters.com.

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Run the Performance audit

1

Open Performance

Click Marketing in the left rail, then the SEO Analysis card, then Manual Tools at the top. Click Launch Site Audit, then the Performance card under Site Audit Tools.
2

Enter your live address

Type the address visitors use, such as www.northwindroasters.com, and pick how many pages to read: 10 pages (Quick) is enough for a small site. Click Analyze Performance. It takes a minute or two.
Performance Analysis: the address www.northwindroasters.com, outlined; 10 pages (Quick), outlined; Analyze Performance and History

Checking Northwind's live site

Use your live address. A Development address is kept out of search engines, so the audit can’t read it and says so.

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Read the results

The cards at the top give the Overall Score, how many pages the audit read, how many kinds of speed problem it found, and the Load Time: how long it took the page’s main content to appear.
Overall Score 54.00/100, Site health from the crawl, outlined; Pages Audited 10; Speed Issues 1, Kinds of speed problem found; and Load Time 1.1 s, When the page's main content appeared (LCP), outlined

Northwind's score and load time

Below them, Core Web Vitals Assessment marks Google’s three speed checks Good or not, with the target for each.

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See which pages are slow, and why

Performance Issues & Recommendations lists each kind of problem, how many pages it affects, what the audit measured on each page, and what to do.
Performance Issues and Recommendations: High, Slow loading pages, 1 page; www.northwindroasters.com: Took 4.1 s to load when the audit read it. The server took 0.3 s to start sending it. What it loads: Images 9.7 MB, Scripts 370 KB. 2 scripts and style sheets have to load before the page can show, outlined; and the recommendation, outlined: Make these pages lighter: compress or resize large images, load images further down the page only when visitors scroll to them, and remove videos, embeds and scripts the page does not need

The home page is heavy with images

Northwind’s home page loads 9.7 MB of images, far more than a page needs, while its server answers quickly. So the images are what to fix.

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Fix it and check again

1

Ask the builder AI

Open the site in the builder and tell the AI what the audit found, for example:
The home page loads 9.7 MB of images and takes 4 seconds. Compress and resize the images on the home page, and load the images further down the page only when visitors scroll to them. Keep the page looking the same.
To try it without touching your live site, do this on a branch: see Try a Change on a Branch First.
2

Publish, then run the audit again

Publish your changes, then click Analyze Performance again. History keeps your earlier results, so you can compare the load time before and after.

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Good to know

  • Other checks: the Technical, Content and Mobile cards run the other parts of the audit. See Run a Site Audit and Fix What It Finds.
  • Fast server, slow page? When the server answers in under a second but the page is slow, the page itself is too heavy: images, videos or extra scripts.