Best Website Speed Testing Tools to Assess Your Website in 2021
Speed is everything for a website’s performance!
According to statistics, when someone opens a website they don’t even wait for 2 seconds until the page appears. Therefore, if your loading page takes more than 2 or more seconds to load, you can lose your precious visitors. So, we can say that website speed aka page load time is a critical component that determines a website’s success or failure.
List of the Best Website Speed Testing Tools :
- Pingdom
- GTmetrix
- Google PageSpeed Insights
- Dareboost
- Load Impact
- Geekflare
- Batch Speed
- WebPageTest
- GiftOfSpeed
- New Relic
- Updtrends
- Cloudinary
What is a Website Speed Testing Tool?
Maintain your website to be at top speed can start from running a website speed test. Website speed testing tool is an essential method for discovering and monitoring page loads of a website. After running the test, the tool will grade your website speed along with explanations about what things slow down your website and how to fix that problem.
Why is Website Speed Matters?
Maybe you’re wondering why do I need to care for a website’s speed?
The short answers are: it affects user experience, SEO (including page ranking), sales, and conversions of your website. You need to understand that the first thing a visitor experience on a website is the loading page time. When your website loads slowly, it may drive away your visitors. As the result, it also decreases your conversion rates and page ranking.
Read more about Website Speed & How to Improve it
How Do Website Speed Testing Tools Work?
After realizing how important it is to have a speedy website, then you might want to try running a website speed test. But, how exactly does this tool help your website?
Website speed testing tools are measuring your website performance metrics and grade them. If the metrics perform badly then it results in a poor grade too. The followings are the most common metrics to watch out for:
Resources that load too long
Resources including fonts, images, plugins, and JS files can slow down your website’s loading.
Time to first byte (TTB) and First meaningful paint (FMP)
The two metrics that are really important for loading page time are TTB and FMP. They will show you when your website starts loading and the second your website starts displaying information.
Load time, number of requests, and page sizes
Load time, the number of requests, and page sizes can dramatically increase the load time of your website. Therefore, you need to pay attention to these metrics.
HTTP headers
HTTP headers are how servers communicate with the server by sending information back and forth via a request or response. By testing this, you can make sure you are getting and sending the right message between the two. Moreover, this is useful when you are trying to debug different errors you might have.
Content Delivery Network (CDN)
Enabling CDN on your website will significantly improve your website’s speed. Therefore, it is necessary to set up CDN to fasten your loading page time.
Page Caching
Caching is the process of storing resources from one request and reusing those resources for subsequent requests. It reduces the amount of work required to generate a page view. Therefore, enabling cache can help your website to load faster.
Top 12 Best Website Speed Testing Tools in 2021
Pingdom – the most popular free speed testing tool
Pingdom is a website monitoring service that provides the most popular website speed testing tool for free. It doesn’t require you to log in and is very easy to use, so it’s great for beginners.
You can start testing your website with Pingdom without logging in then it will give you immediate reports. The site’s performance is graded from 0 to 100 and provides the details, such as response codes, content size, request types, requests by domain, and a waterfall chart that lets you see details on your file’s load times. Read more
GTmetrix – all in one speed testing tool
GTmetrix is a website performance analytics service developed by GT.net, a company best known for the Pingdom speed monitoring tool. It is the most popular alternative to Pingdom. You can say that GTmetrix is an all-in-one speed testing tool as it combines Google PageSpeed Insights and YSlow to generate its scores and recommendations.
You can use GTmetrix both for free or paid. After running the test, GTmetrix provides you with detailed information on your page speed, timings, performance score, and much more. Not only that, but GTmetrix also provides information about how to fix the issues that were exposed by the test. Read more
Google Page Speed Insights – speed testing tool by Google
Google Page Speed Insights is a website speed testing tool by Google. It is a simple tool to measures the performance of a page for mobile devices and desktop devices. You can use this tool for free and without logging in.
The grading system is based on Lighthouse and ranges from 0 to 100 points. A higher score is better and a score of 85 or above indicates that the page is performing well. Besides grading your website, it also gives you a report page providing detailed information about render-blocking code, TTFB, page sizes, and more. Moreover, there are steps to improve performance and additional user experience suggestions for mobile devices. Read more
Dareboost – best speed test report suitable for company
DareBoost is an all-in-one service for website speed testing, web performance monitoring, and website analysis (speed, SEO, quality, security). It provides a free website speed test five times per month with detailed analysis from multiple locations across the world both from mobile and desktop. You can use this as a report to your boss or company.
Before running the test, you need DareBoost to create an account first. The report is simple and provides a lot of information. The tool analyzes over 80 different data points including the First byte, cache policy, number of requests, browser rendering, security, accessibility, jQuery, data amount, SEO, and more. Also, you can quickly see where your website is struggling and needs work. Read more
Load Impact – reliable speed testing tool
Load Impact is one of the best tools for testing how scalable your website is. It has performed over 1.2 million load tests and is the load testing software of choice for many developers and users. You can use Load Impact for free (5 reports per month).
The results of the speed test are displayed as a handy graph, demonstrating how your load time changes when more users visit your website. Also, it shows parameters such as bandwidth usage, requests made, and the number of requests per second. To ensure your site caters to a truly global audience, Load Impact will also send virtual users to your website from different locations. Read more
Geekflare – great speed testing tools by the website expert
Basically, Geekflare is a website that provides resources, such as tools, APIs, and articles, to help people build their websites. Inside its tool they created, there is the Website Audit tool for assessing your website’s performance, SEO, and of course site speed too.
Geekflare will score your website based on its performance, best practices, and SEO. Besides that, it also shows metrics, such as loading time, time to first byte (TTFB), first contentful paint, page size, total blocking time, and HTTP/2. Under those scores, Geekflare also provides performance audits, including suggestions that can help your site load faster and more information about the performance of your applications. Read more
Batchspeed – compare yours to other competitors performance
Batch Speed is a bulk page speed test using the Google Page Speed Checker (Lighthouse). It searches websites, sitemaps, lists, and URLs before speed testing the pages that result. This tool allows you to view and export page speed scores for your website or competitors, as well as track performance changes. Batch Speed can help you boost the speed of your SEO website and optimize its performance. Read more
WebPageTest – provide a special speed test
WebPageTest.org is an open-source website performance testing tool created by Patrick Meenan, a Chrome engineer at Google. This tool benchmark your website from one of its 40 locations and a wide range of devices. You can also choose to simulate your tests over a slow mobile network or a fast 4G network.
This tool grades your website performance from A to F and includes parameter results including load time, first-byte time, caching, page size, request, waterfall charts, and more. Not only that, but WebPageTest also provides a special test to compare 3 different test results to help you figure out if the DNS or CDN might cause any delay and if the server can respond to all requests. Read more
GiftOfSpeed – speed tool with years of experience
GiftOfSpeed is a page speed audit that helps you get your website’s pages to load as quickly as possible. It has years of expertise and is confident in its knowledge of how to get the most out of any website. They have many things to offer and a very great tool to make your page speed up, With this tool, you can run a speed test and get immediate reports within seconds. Read more
New Relic – multifunction premium speed testing tool
New Relic is a multifunction platform that offers all sorts of services from application performance monitoring, server monitoring, mobile monitoring, and real-time user insights. Precisely, this is a premium tool, but if you need more data than what the above tools provide, this would be the one you want to invest in. This tool provides a very detailed report with visual graphs. Not only that, but you can also get notifications when your website is slowing down and help you to fix it. Read more
Uptrends – simple speed testing tool
Uptrends is a straightforward website performance testing tool. It uses proactive website performance testing based on 184 global checkpoints, as well as the detection of recurrent browser issues using snapshot screen captures. There are Uptrends’ synthetic and real user monitoring approaches where multi-step web app transactions can be observed and click routes constructed using the transaction recorder tool.
After running the test, Uptrends will show metrics like frontend duration, backend duration, load time along with pie charts to visualize the result. You can use the free test by Uptrends or upgrade to its Uptrends Synthetics product, which is the premium version of the tool. Read more
Cloudinary – speed testing tool for image analysis
In fact, Cloudinary is a digital asset manager (DAM) service, but it also provides a website speed test tool for image analysis. It analyzes images on your website along with optimizing images to significantly improve Web page load time. This tool provides measurable and actionable information about how to go beyond simple compression: discover how changes to image size, format selection, quality, and encoding can dramatically improve page load speed. Read more
Conclusion
Speed is important for a website to perform and rank well on the internet. When your website can load fast, it can increase your page ranking, conversion rates, and of course give a good user experience for your visitors. One thing you can do to make sure your website is on top speed is by running a speed test. This tool assesses your website’s speed performance, grades it, and gives solutions to fix it. There are many website speed testing tools on the internet for free. From this article, you can find out which speed testing tools is right for you.
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