Do you check your site performance and what tools do you use to check/ optimise

I see a lot of discussion about SEO on the forum but little about performance and wondered how users measure or improve it.

My understanding is that Google expects the first contentful paint to occur within 1.8 seconds and anything over 3 seconds is considered slow and leads to poor rankings.

Personally i use GTMertrix ( https://gtmetrix.com/ ) as my “go to” testing site (which also incorporated lighthouse functionality)

I have been looking at a number of sites mentioned by forum members and running them through gtmetrix and see some pretty slow sites.
perhaps tips on increasing performance would be a really useful thread?

I wont name and shame but this is what we should aiming for (or better)

image1216×202 24.5 KB

I am seeing a lot like this

image1220×188 25.9 KB

or even like this

image1214×193 26.3 KB

I really think this is an area which is not getting the attention it needs.
Good servers are important as are fast CDNs. Optimization and edge caching is really a must do nowadays