Firstly it’s worth clarifying that your website can be slow to load and slow in terms of interactivity (I.e. when you click on a button nothing happens).

Whilst tools exist that I can share which list how well you score on a scale of 1 – 100 or A – F, a more practical and simpler test is simply to disconnect from wifi on your phone and click around your website. If the pages are taking a long time to finish loading, things randomly shift around and when you click on something it takes a noticeably long time for anything to happen – then it’s probably slow enough to warrant having a conversation.

The aim here is to keep people in the flow of what they’re doing, a button not doing anything when I click on it creates rage clicks and is usually a good reason for someone to go back to a search engine and try someone else.

Lab testing, sometimes called synthetic testing, refers to using tools which try to emulate the experiences of users and in doing so measures and scores what they expect will be your scores. Lab testing is integral for measuring whilst working on improvements, it allows engineers to see what the expected difference in timing will be once released to the website.

RUM, or Real User Measurement, testing is when you proactively measure users experiences when using your website. The benefit here is that it is 1st party data, which means it’s more dependable and carries no erroneous assumptions.

A fun bit of trivia is that Google actually provides you with RUM data by discreetly measuring users experiences in the chrome browser. This means that even if you have not been actively measuring your users interactions you can gather some data from Chrome.