Checked on 3rd February 2020
This bespoke website was designed and built in January 2020.
You can view the live website at www.rachaeldalton.com.
Please note the date of this review, and that things may have changed since that date.
Links to various report pages are included, so you can see for yourself, and/or test other websites.
This is more of a publicity drive for some freely-available tools, rather than an in-depth critique of this individual website.
This is a perfect comparison with www.yourbusinessva.co.uk which was built and reviewed around the same time - that website was built using WordPress.
The owner was incredibly lucky to still be able to secure a .com of their full name.
The website is a standard "brochure" website, with 5 pages.
When comparing with other websites, the speed of click-to-load between pages is pretty impressive.
It takes roughly 240ms to load each page completely.
This high-performance website was built by-hand, ensuring every aspect of each page could be optimised, rather than using a tool like WordPress which removes this granular control.
A website "framework" (called Bootstrap) was used to assist in the layout of the pages, and some common elements, such as forms and buttons.
The Bootstrap framework was created by the folks at Twitter, and is now a mature framework used by many websites.
Bootstrap contains everything you could ever want, including the kitchen-sink, so care has to be taken to only include the things you actually use on the website, otherwise you could cause a slowdown unnecessarily.
In addition, for a variety of icons (envelope, phone, etc.) the FontAwesome package was also used.
This package is a little more difficult to slice up, and work is continuing, so any speed scores seen here today, should be improved in the near future.
Self explanatory.
Expert at work.
See the full report on Google's PageSpeed Insights tool.
It's rare to see a score of 100, so something to be proud of, but desktop is easier to score, compared to mobile (see below).
As a comparison, a WordPress website I recently reviewed only managed a score of 51 - a simple indication of what happens when you don't build a website properly.
An impressive score for mobile on the PageSpeed Insights tool, but could still be improved upon.
Work will continue to reduce the effect of importing the FontAwesome package, to reduce load times even further.
Achieving a score of 100 on mobile is nearly unheard of, but a great goal to have nonetheless.
Compare this result to a WordPress site that only managed to achieve a score of 16.
Any business website, irrespective of size, should be hosted professionally on a server that is not over-crowded.
This website is sharing a server with just 13 other websites
This is what the industry calls "Fully Managed Hosting", usually not available to small businesses, but I couldn't put a client website on Shared Hosting and still have a clear conscience.
Finally, the website is monitored 24/7/365 to catch any spikes in load time, or the website going offline completely.
This is a standard feature for all website I build - does your web-designer or web-host offer this?
How do you know your website is actually online 24/7?
This monitoring includes historical charts showing any trends, which is useful to spot any growing concerns.
This is a good example of how fast a simple request to the server should be.
This is not the time taken to load an entire page.
To load a complete web-page actually requires about 50 individual requests to the server - now you can appreciate why these speeds need to be super-fast.
This is a great example of a relatively simple website, that is built properly, and will serve the business well.
Google likes it, which will give it an advantage over other similar (slower) websites.
Never settle for 2nd-best when your business is at stake.
As I continue to review larger and more complex websites that are built to this high standard, you'll notice that the scores don't decrease - the size of website should not matter when it is built by an expert web designer.
For an example of how not to build a website, see the review for www.yourbusinessva.co.uk.
I would highly recommend Rob, from on-going website updates to swift replies to my questions, Rob has been fantastic. I have received so many amazing comments about my web site.
Do you need help with your own website? Let's have a chat and see how I can help.