To run a successful website, website speed also plays a crucial role. It is also in a top priority in Google’s requirements. A fast loading website provides a lag-free and responsive user experience. Although, there are many benefits that a fast website gives.
I think we have all be in a situation where a website slows down that it almost becomes unbearable to wait. But there are things that you can do that may speed up the loading of the web pages. But First, at all, you need to check your website speed.
How Will You test Your Site Speed?
Many of the beginners have the same question. Let me tell you, there are numbers of free tool available over the internet that may help you to test website speed. In other words, the Website speed test tools are the simplest way to gain valuable insight into the state of your company’s site.
By taking a number of factors into account, the tool reveals back-end issues that may be stifling your website.
Benefits of using Website Speed Test Tools:
- Pinpoint scripts, fonts, and plugins causing load time issues (HTML, JavaScript, CSS)
- Check minification of your scripts
- Find large images resulting in bottlenecks
- Determine if you have render-blocking JavaScript or CSS
- Test Time to First Byte (TTFB)
- Analyze total load times, page sizes, and # of requests
- Check performance from different geographical locations
- Check rendering speed in different browsers
- Analyze HTTP Headers
- Measure performance of your Content Delivery Network
- Verifying that assets are loading correctly from your CDN
I hope, you are now clear about basics of web performance above. Now, check out these 6 free website speed test tools below for testing your website’s speed.
1. Google PageSpeed Insights:
Google PageSpeed Insights analyze every content of your site and generate suggestions to make them faster. It measures the performance of a page for mobile devices and desktop devices. Google PageSpeed Insights grades your website on a scale of 1 – 100. If it displaying higher number, that means you have better optimized your site. That’s great!!
PageSpeed Insights measures how the page can improve its performance on:
- Time to above-the-fold load: Elapsed time from the moment a user requests a new page and to the moment the above-the-fold content is rendered by the browser.
- Time to full-page load: Elapsed time from the moment a user requests a new page to the moment the page is fully rendered by the browser.
2. GTMetrix:
GTmetrix is a great tool that tells you a lot about your website performance. It gives the complete picture on how your site loads. In addition, it helps you to detect the bottlenecks in your files.
It shows report on the basis of grades from F to A. The reports are generated into five different sections including PageSpeed, YSlow, waterfall breakdown, video, and history.
Through interactive graphs, it keeps track of page performance with scheduled monitoring.
Other advanced features include a video playback to analyze where your bottleneck is occurring and the ability to run Adblock plus.
3. Pingdom:
Pingdom is probably one of the more well-known websites speed test tools. It shows complete overview with more information such as a size analysis, size per domain, the number of requests per domain, and what type of content had the most requests.
Pingdom uses more than 70 global polling locations to test and verify our sites 24/7. It tests the site with real web browsers so that the outcome match the end-user experience exactly.
In short, it is an easy-to-use tool to help webmasters and web developers.
4. KeyCDN Website Speed Test:
KeyCDN website speed tool gives a complete overview on how your website performs. The test includes a waterfall breakdown and a visual website preview at the bottom.
In other words, this tool makes implementation verification faster and easier.
5. WebPage Test:
Developed and supported by Google, the WebPagetest makes an effort to make the web faster. Like GtMetrix it shows the outcome in the form of grades F to A.
The tool does performance test by selecting almost 40 locations and 25 browsers. Its performance tests include FTTB, compression, caching, effective use of a CDN, etc.
In addition, it consists advanced features like video capture, disabling JavaScript, ignoring SSL certificates, and spoofing user agent strings.
6. YSlow:
YSlow is an open source tool that analyzes web pages on the basis of three steps.
- By crawling the DOM to find all components (image, scripts, etc.).
- Gaining information about each part size (gzip, expire headers, etc.)
- Taking data and generates a grade for each rule, which in turn gives you an overall grade.
Based on Yahoo!’s rules for high-performance websites, it helps you figure out why they are slow.
As you know, different website speed test tools have their own unique features. Once you know where the bottlenecks are you can begin to fix them. Although, It is a good idea to regularly test your site and a establish a benchmark so over time you can make improvements read our trending tutorial to get almost 100% PageSpeed on Newspaper theme.
