Webpagetest is a common and free tool for evaluating the performance of websites. Webpagetest allows you to run online performance tests on your site from several locations around the world and in a variety of browsers. You will find values for the following parameters of your webpage on this page.

• Load Time – The time it takes for the website to load;
• First Byte Time – The time your request began to execute;
• Page Size – The total size of your Web page;
• Requests – The total number of requests made by your Web page.

How to use WebPageTest?

How to Run a test?

To run a test, go to WebPageTest – Website Performance and Optimization Test and fill out the form as follows:

Type in your website’s URL

Make sure it’s exactly the same as the default URL. If you’re using https, make sure you’re using it to get the most up-to-date stuff. If you’re going to use www, make sure you use it as well.

Choose a test location

That is close to where the guests are likely to arrive. Since we live in New Jersey, we typically use New York, NY. Dulles, VA is the default choice, so you can use it – there are often too many tests waiting in other places, and Dulles appears to be the quickest in most cases.

Choose a Browser

Different test locations can have different browser choices – most people usually use Chrome, but Internet Explorer is also a popular alternative. The default test position is Dulles, VA, which has options for all of the browsers Webpagetest supports, so select Dulles if you want all of the options.

Advanced Settings

This is optional, but some people prefer to run three tests before looking at the First View and Repeat View. You can also uncheck capture video for now to speed things up a little.

Link

This simulates the type of internet connection used by your guest. You can fiddle with this setting, but we usually leave it at Cable because it’s the most popular.

Keep Test Private

This simply prevents it from appearing as a “recently tested website” on the webpagetest.org website – we normally leave this reviewed.

Press the Start Test button.

What Is the Best Way to Set Parameters?

• URL – Test URL
• runs – Number of test runs
• fvonly – Skip the Repeat View test by setting to 1
• f – Answer Format
• k – API Key Set to XML to request an XML response or JSON to request a JSON encoded response (required for public instance)

How to Check Test Status?

• After you submit a test, you will receive the XML response below.
• Look at the test Id field in the answer and make a note of it.
• Since Webpagetest is a free and widely used method, your Request must join the queue and wait for its turn.
• Using your test id, do a GET to http://www.webpagetest.org/testStatus.php to check the status of your test.

How to read the WebPageTest results?

After you’ve completed the exam, you’ll be taken to a screen with a range of results to look at. For the purposes of this article, we’ll just look at the top area, which includes letter grades and a table with Performance Results. To be honest, you probably don’t look at these, but if you’re someone who wants all A’s, you can take a look and then work on your page to boost it. It’s not about getting pretty green A’s; it’s about making your website quick.

What are the Alphabets meaning?

1. F = First Byte Time – the time it takes for the server to react to a user browsing the website; this is typically the backend time required to create the page, and hosting is often a factor in this being too slow.
2. A = Keep Alive Enabled – in simple terms, this is a communication that occurs between the web server and browser that says, “Hey, you can catch more than one file at a time” – this allows several files to be accessed at once, while otherwise only one file would be downloaded at a time, lengthening the process.
3. C = Compress Transfer – this is a signal that tells you how large or small your files are. You should be fine if you have GZIP compression enabled.
4. A = Compress Images – images are one of the most common problems on most websites, and compressing them reduces the size of the website while also eliminating image meta data, which can increase speed significantly.
5. B = Cache Static Content – content on your website that does not change often, such as photos and javascript files, can be configured so that the USER’s browser can store them so that when they return to your website, they can simply use the copy saved in their cache instead of waiting for it to load. This is extremely useful for future visits.
6. X = Effective Use of CDN – If your website uses a CDN (Content Distribution Network), it will be expressed here.

Why Users Love to Use WebPageTest?

Because of its simplicity and custom settings, Webpagetest is their go-to for speed tests. This allows for more reliable performance. They’re mostly operating with the default settings for this article, with a few tweaks.

WebPageTest recently added a protection ranking that will assist website owners in determining where they are vulnerable. Another feature that distinguishes it is the ability to obtain several speed samples from their website – for example, if they perform a three-test run, they will receive a first, second, and third run.

The results overview would then give you an average of the three measures. In an ideal world, their third run should be quicker than their third since some of their content would be cached on the third test; if their third is slower than their first, they will have other problems.

Who can Use WebPageTest and Is it Free?

There is a public instance with a wide pool of servers that anyone can use for free, and we’ll be using it in the examples in the post. Alternatively, if you want to host the platform privately on your own infrastructure, the source code is available on GitHub.

References

• WebPagetest API Tutorial with Example (guru99.com)
• How To Use WebPageTest To Improve Website Speed (2dogsdesign.com)
• How To Use WebPageTest and its API | CSS-Tricks