Your website’s response time plays a big role in both user experience and search engine rankings. If it’s too slow, visitors may leave, and your SEO can suffer. That’s why it’s important to check website response time periodically and fix issues when needed.
The good news is, checking your website’s response time is quick and free. In this guide, we’ll show you how to measure it accurately using a free tool. Plus, we’ll share practical tips to help you improve your website’s response time if it needs a boost.
You can check your website’s response time instantly for free using WebYes.
The tool shows the accurate website response time in just seconds. Also, it provides continuous monitoring, helping you track changes in response time, spot anomalies as they occur, and act quickly to keep your site running smoothly.
Here’s how to monitor the response time of your website using WebYes:
In the Uptime section, you’ll see your current response time, average response time, and your website’s uptime. By default, WebYes checks your response time every three minutes, but you can easily adjust the monitoring frequency to suit your needs.
A good website response time is between 1 and 2 seconds, with anything under 1 second considered ideal. Here, response time refers to the time it takes for the website to start loading in the browser after a user makes a request – not the server response time.
If your website’s response time is 3 seconds or more, it can start to feel noticeably slow and frustrating for users, often leading to higher bounce rates. It can also negatively impact your SEO rankings, as CWV is a known ranking factor for search engines.
We’ve covered this in more detail in our guide on what makes a good website response time, including why it matters and how to improve it. We recommend checking it out to ensure your site is delivering a fast, user-friendly experience.
We recommend reading our article on the impact of Core Web Vitals on SEO to understand why fast website response time is important for search engine rankings.
By now, you’ve likely checked your website’s response time and compared it to the recommended benchmarks. If your site doesn’t quite cut it – don’t worry. Here are some practical tips to help you improve a slow website response time.
10 effective tips to improve website response time
If your website is running on cheap shared hosting, that could be why it feels slow. When you share resources with hundreds of other sites, your response time suffers. Upgrading to a VPS, cloud, or dedicated hosting plan gives your site the power it needs to perform well.
Quick Tip: Popular fast hosting providers include Cloudways, Kinsta, SiteGround, and WP Engine.
A lot of slowdowns start at the server level. Things like unoptimised database queries, unnecessary background tasks, and outdated protocols can all drag your response time down. Clean up your backend, enable server-side caching, and switch to HTTP/2 or HTTP/3 for faster delivery.
Pro Tip: Tools like Query Monitor (for WordPress) can help you find slow database queries.
The farther your users are from your server, the longer it takes to load your site. A CDN fixes that by storing copies of your content on servers around the world. That way, your site loads quickly no matter where your visitors are.
Recommended CDNs: Try Cloudflare, BunnyCDN, or AWS CloudFront.
Without caching, your server has to build every page from scratch every time someone visits. Caching stores a ready-to-go version of your site so it can load instantly. It’s one of the quickest ways to shave seconds off your response time.
Useful Tools: WP Rocket, LiteSpeed Cache, W3 Total Cache can help you set up caching easily.
Your site’s code might be bloated with spaces, comments, and unnecessary characters. That extra weight slows things down more than you think. Minifying your CSS, JavaScript, and HTML, and enabling GZIP compression, can make a noticeable difference.
Quick Tools: Use Autoptimize, Fast Velocity Minify, or Minifier.org to minify your files.
Oversized images are one of the biggest speed killers. If your images aren’t compressed, your site has to load heavy files every time. Use lightweight formats like WebP and compress your images to keep things fast without sacrificing quality.
Helpful Tools: Try TinyPNG, ShortPixel, or Squoosh to compress your images.
Every plugin, script, or background task adds pressure on your server. If you’re running too many, they’ll slow your response time and drain server resources. Do a quick audit, remove what you don’t need, and keep only the essentials.
Pro Tip: In WordPress, use the Asset CleanUp plugin to manage and disable unnecessary scripts.
Some scripts and stylesheets block your page from showing up quickly. When the browser has to load everything before showing content, users are left waiting. Defer or async-load non-essential JavaScript so your site feels faster right away.
Quick Tools: Use Async JavaScript (WordPress plugin) or PageSpeed Insights to identify render-blocking files.
If your site is overloaded with fancy themes, widgets, and unnecessary content, it’s bound to slow down. Simplifying your design and removing extra elements lightens the load. A cleaner website doesn’t just look better – it loads faster too.
Quick Tip: Avoid heavy multi-purpose themes and stick to lightweight ones like GeneratePress or Astra.
Your website won’t warn you when it starts slowing down – but monitoring tools will. Keeping an eye on your response time helps you catch problems early. Tools like WebYes can alert you when something’s off, so you can fix it before users notice.
Recommended Tools: Use WebYes, UptimeRobot, or Pingdom to monitor response time automatically.
It’s a good practice to check your website response time at least once a week or whenever you make major updates. For critical websites, continuous monitoring is recommended to catch issues in real time.
Server response time measures how quickly your server replies to a request. Website response time includes server response plus network delays and the time it takes for the site to start loading in the browser.
A good server response time (TTFB) is under 800ms (0.8 seconds), as recommended by Google. A good website response time is under 1 second, with anything between 1–2 seconds still considered acceptable.
Article by
Melwyn holds a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science and has been writing professionally for over 4 years. He has a strong background in SEO and is certified in web accessibility from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). When he's not writing about website optimisation, you can find him enjoying a game of FIFA or exploring the open world of GTA.
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