How to speed check your website

 In 2018, improving the speed of your website has now moved from being an option to a necessity. Google is starting to downgrade slow websites and users expect speedy sites. Either way, testing page rendering speed is critical and essential. Now you are ready to enjoy the results of your speed check your website. Here are some of the best resources to do it.

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Website Performance Testing Tools

There are a number of free tools you can use to benchmark your website’s loading time. The following details these tools along with how to use them and any pros and cons.

1. Google PageSpeed Insights

 Google PageSpeed Insights rates your website out of 100 for both desktop and mobile and provides page speed improvements for your website in order of severity.

https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/

Images can be a big part of what slows down a page and the PageSpeed Insights tool will provide optimised images for you to download. Just be sure to review them as they don’t always get this 100% correct.

2. Pingdom

 Pingdom gives you a more detailed summary of your website’s site speed and you can test from multiple locations such as Stockholm, Melbourne, and New York. Pingdom provides the load time, page size, and real-world comparisons with other sites.

As a general rule of thumb, your website should have a load time of under 3 seconds and a page size under 3MB. The tool also provides a categorised breakdown showing exactly which types of files (and individual files) are extending your loading time.



Although this tester doesn’t give you the optimised files for your website, it does provide a detailed report of where your website’s speed is being affected.

3. WebPageTest

 WebPageTest allows you to test loading time in specific browsers. The tool runs three tests and provides a median result giving you a real-world idea of page loading speeds. This tool also plots a timeline of your webpage to see how long it takes to load the whole page

4. site-perf.com | site performance

This site is very responsive and lets you test from a few different servers — two in the U.S. and two overseas.

5. websiteoptimization.com | website optimization

This service (and it’s accompanying documentation and guidance around optimization) is one of the best at giving recommendations on what to fix.

6. whichloadsfaster.com | which site loads faster?

This site allows you to compare your site against another to see which loads faster. It also lets you do multiple tests in a row to get a better baseline. Hint: if you load faster than Google’s front page then you’re doing well.

7. browser load time stopwatch | lifehacker

This is also one of my most-used options for testing speed. It’s different than the others because it’s not a web page, but rather a piece of JavaScript that runs. You add the link to your bookmarks and execute it to test the page you’re currently on.

8. google chrome page speed | extension

The Page Speed chrome extension is phenomenal for getting results that look like a local application in terms of detail and presentation.

9. google chrome developer tools | built-in tool

Many don’t realize that Google Chrome has a wicked-powerful set of tools built in. By opening the tools from the options menu you not only have the classics that let you manipulate JavaScript, see page layout, etc., but you also have a network display that lets you see what took the longest to load. It’s like a mini Page Speed display without the extension.

10. yslow | browser extension

YSlow is like Google’s Page Speed, only not quite as advanced and available for more platforms. It’s now available for Chrome as well.

11. webpagetest.org | web page test

This is another very solid web-based test that gives extremely detailed output with regard to what the request looked like from the browser.

12. google analytics | google

It’s now possible to track load speed through Google Analytics. Simply get the latest version of the tracking script that has the functionality in it, and you’ll see it as an option within your metrics.

13. google’s webmaster tools

Google’s Webmaster Tools has a Page Speed menu under Labs that shows you how fast your various pages have been loading. The options is very beta, however, as it gives you no control over what to test and not much information on what has been tested.

In addition to the listings on the market, MySpeed by ToHsoft is also a very useful website speed test solution, let's experience the website test that we just mentioned. =>

The Need For Loading speed check your website!

Each of these tools is useful and we use them all when optimising websites. By reviewing the output you should be able to make real improvements to your pages’ loading time.

If you have any questions on how to understand what is slowing down your website or how to speed things up then drop a comment below or get in touch via our contact page.



And if you are considering a new website, view or download our comprehensive website planning guide.

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