5 Best Tools To Test Website Performance & Optimizations
Do you own a website? Then, you must ensure that your website loads fast & is free from any errors. To ensure this, you need to do a website test.
Fast loading websites have many advantages over slow websites. They tend to rank higher in search engines, helps to reduce bounce rate & improve user experience.
Why Test Website?
Checking website performance time-to-time ensures that your website is loading fast & is free from any bugs. It is recommended to test the website once a week.
Website testing allows you to make necessary changes & optimizations on your website to ensure your website is loading correctly.
Sites To Test Website
You should run a website test time-to-time to see if your website is loading fast or not. You should check the speed from different regions over the world.
There are many websites that allow you to test your website & generate a report. I researched & found out these 5 best sites to test websites.
1. GTmetrix
GTmetrix is the most popular tool to test the website. It uses a combination of Google PageSpeed Insights and YSlow to generate scores and recommendations.
It also shows a waterfall chart, page load timings (TTFB, Connect, Redirect, etc.), Page Load Video, and Filmstrip. It also allows you to select the connection speed (Broadband, LTE, 3G, 2G, Unthrottled).
Testing Locations
2. Pingdom
It generates a performance grade, a total load time, the total page size, and the number of requests you have on your website. It also shows suggestions to improve page performance.
You will be able to view content size & requests by content type & domain. You can also look at all the details of all the file requests of your website.
Testing Locations
3. Google Pagespeed
This is an official tool by Google to check your website’s Pagespeed score. It shows your performance score for mobile & desktop. Try to score above 90.
Along with this result, you’ll also see several recommendations from Google on how to improve your performance. Here, you can’t select the test location.
4. FastOrSlow
This tool by Wordfence tests your website from 17 locations at once & shows the overall performance. You can also view all the details for each location.
It is one of the best tools to test website performance as of now. It provides all the details such as page requests, First-byte time, etc along with graphs.
Testing Locations
5. WebPageTest
If you want a detailed analysis of your website, use WebPageTest. It shows all the details of requests, waterfall view, connection graph, scores for different performance elements, etc.
You can test your website by selecting different browsers, locations, connections & devices. It offers a wide range of them. You can perform tests up to 9 times at once.
Testing Locations
Conclusion
These were the top 5 best tools to test website performance & analyze it to make necessary changes & optimizations to make your website’s performance better.
Some other tools to test websites include KeyCDN, Dareboost, dot-com, etc.
FAQs
How do I check website performance?
You can use tools like GTmetrix, Pingdom, FastOrSlow, WebPageTest, etc to test your website performance.
What is the best website loading time?
The website should load within 5 secs. The lesser the time, the more you will get benefits. Faster websites tend to rank higher in search engines.
How can I check website response time?
You can use a tool called Bitcatcha to check your website’s response time from different locations. It should be less in your audience’s region.
How do I fix a slow website?
Buy a fast web hosting, use cache & CDN, compress images, minify CSS & HTML code to make your website load fast.