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When you buy a car you know you need to know more about the car than it looks good.

A good motor will make all the difference. With a website, how would you know what is under the hood?

There are free publicly available tools to measure your sites performance.

Here is a hint: when you want a site built and are considering which business to get to do the work – measure their site.

If it is slow, and especially if it has a poor accessibility score – Run.

https://pagespeed.web.dev/ by Google provides Page Speed Insights and is widely recognized as an excellent resource.

Pingdom is also good. It allows choosing different sites from around the world to test from. https://tools.pingdom.com/

Don’t get too excited about the results of one test – try several tests at different times.

I wouldn’t worry too much about scoring all 100’s – working to numbers for the sake of numbers can be problematic.

However, a new site should score 100 for accessibility. This should be not negotiable. That said, be careful and test a few times. Site’s tested with Page Speed Insights can return a false score.

I just ran a test on the home page for this site and it shows straight 100s on a mobile phone (harder to achieve) and only 96 on desktop on the same test run, saying there is no alt tag on an image.

This is a false score as the image has an alt tag, but an alt tag is not expected on a background image.
As noted above, working to numbers can be problematic.

This site is eight years old. There are better tools today to enhance your site build for better performance. Accessibility features in a website are an ongoing thing to watch and to test.

It is quite simple to leave out required work when writing a post – however a brand new site should be delivered to you in good order.

A test run with Page Speed Insights, regardless of the age or complexity of the site should score consistently in the 80’s.

If the people wanting to build your site have a poor score on their own site, you can be assured they do not have the capability to build you a sound, secure, performant site.

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