Best Ways to Do a Website Speed Test
The pain of a slow-loading website is one that is universally shared and understood! No one wants to explore or use a website whose pages simply won’t load. Slow-loading websites often see fewer conversions than those that load quickly and are really bad for your SEO. This is why businesses across the world are always looking for ways to test their website speed and improve it however they can.
There are various website speed tests and website performance monitoring tools that you can use to your advantage. The trick is to always use multiple tools to test your website speed so that you can make sure it’s not lagging. Your goal should be to boost your page load speed so that your users can enjoy a faster and much more consistent and enjoyable user experience.
Here are some effective tools that you can use to speed test your website:
Pingdom
Pingdom is inarguably a highly popular website performance monitoring tool. The reason for its popularity is its ease of use and its promising feature that allows you to choose various geographical locations to run your speed test. This website speed testing gives an overview of the results that is quite easy to understand. This overview is backed by a detailed report with suggestions on how you can improve your website performance.
IsItWP Website Speed Test Tool
This is a free, beginner-friendly website speed test tool. With this tool, you can check your website’s performance and run multiple tests. You can explore the results to figure out what is making your website lag. It also highlights neatly organized and categorized suggestions for improvement. You can click on every category to discover the steps that you can take to fix any performance issues. IsItWP also offers some other useful tools, such as server uptime monitoring, for website owners.
Google Pagespeed Insights
This is Google’s very own website performance and speed monitoring tool. It provides you with comprehensive performance reports for your website’s desktop and mobile view. You can study the data from these reports and find common issues between the two.
This tool also recommends any issues that you can fix with the mobile and desktop versions. It provides you with detailed recommendations for every issue that it finds, which is highly useful for your website developer. With that said, this tool is a bit more complex and can be intimidating to use for novice users and anyone who is not a developer.
WebPageTest
This is another free website speed testing tool that you can use. Although it’s certainly a bit more advanced and complex than some of the other tools that we’ve mentioned, it has many perks as well. It comes with a feature that enables you to choose your geographic location and browser for the speed tests that you conduct. Also, this tool runs the test three times by default to generate your website speed test results. It also generates a detailed view of each test result. All you have to do is click on it and it will expand, allowing you to view the full report.
GTmetrix
This is another power-packed tool that you can use to speed test your website. With this tool, you can test your increased website speed with tools such as YSlow and Pagespeed. It also allows you to change your browser and geographic location by creating an account. It will show you a detailed speed test report with a succinct summary of your result. You can also switch between the two tools and view the recommendations made by both. Simply click on each recommendation to see the details.
Uptrends
This is another free speed testing tool for websites that allows you to choose your geographic region and browser. It also allows you to switch between desktop and mobile versions. The results generated by Uptrends are easy to understand. It also highlights your Google Page-speed score in its summary. You can scroll down the page for a detailed report and look through the resources to recognize your performance issues.
Load Impact
This tool is a bit different than the other tools on this list because it enables you to see how your website can slow down when more traffic arrives simultaneously. With that said, it’s a paid service with a limited free test, which only permits you to test 25 virtual users to your site within 3 minutes. The paid version permits you to test significantly larger traffic loads, which helps you test your website speed and its relation with the traffic inflow.
Byte Check
This is a free website response time checker tool. It was particularly designed to check TTFB (time to first byte) measurement, which is essentially the time your website takes to send the first byte of data to your user’s browser. It allows you to test how fast your WordPress hosting server is.
You can use any of the aforementioned tools to conduct a website speed test. However, these tests will not guarantee your website’s performance in all scenarios. At times, your website will face more traffic, which might slow down its overall speed. When you don’t have too much traffic, then your website might work more quickly.
To have more accurate results, you must run these tests as thoroughly as possible. The first step is to run multiple tests on different tools. Run at least three tests for a more accurate picture and take note of the time it took to download the complete webpage.
Additionally, always make sure to check from different geographic locations. It will help you see different user experiences. You can use Google Analytics to see where your traffic is coming from and use that location to speed test your website. If the traffic is widespread, then run multiple tests with the different locations for a more well-rounded result.
The bottom line is that you need to use the tools at your disposal to test your website speed and do everything you can to improve it. This will help you greatly enhance your user experience. You can also get in touch with Cohn Media for excellent website design and development, which will ultimately help boost your conversion rate!