Top 5 Online Tools for Testing Your Website Speed
When was the last time you patiently waited for a sluggish website to load completely? Can’t remember? Well nobody does… No visitor has time to wait for a slow loading website, especially when there are so many other websites available.
And this holds good for your own website as well. If you can’t work on your website speed, be prepared to lose your loyal visitors as well as ranking in search engines. There are a lot of factors that can be responsible for a poorly performing website. So, for a remedial action, always begin by checking your website speed and then move on to analyzing the reasons behind it.
In order to help you get started, here are 5 best online tools to speed check your website loading time.
1. Google PageSpeed Insights
This awesome tool from Google gives insight into your website performance on a mobile device as well as on a desktop computer. For each type of these 2 devices, it assigns a score to your website on a scale of 100 points. It takes into consideration separately – the time taken to load the above-the-fold portion and that for the full content of your web page. It however, does not consider the performance of your network connection. So, if your network connection is good, you can improve your website speed by implementing the suggestions given by this web tool.
2. Bitcatcha Server Speed Check
The Bitcatcha tool is designed to check the speed of your web hosting as distinguished from the overall page load time of your website. It measures the server response time for requests made from different geographical locations including US, UK, Australia, Japan and India, among others. This helps you to decide whether or not your web hosting provider is suitable for your target audience. The tool also gives an overall rating to your website. A rating of ‘A’ or ‘B’ is considered ideal. At worst, it should not be beyond ‘C’. However, since the result varies depending upon the stability of the network, make sure you perform several checks before coming to any conclusion.
3. Pingdom Website Speed Test
Pingdom gives an indepth analysis on what areas you are doing well and what areas need improvement. It is a user-friendly tool that is equally helpful to developers and novices alike. It examines almost each and every part of your website and the best part is you can filter the list of these elements in different ways. The test is performed from different locations using real web browsers; so the results are close to what the end users experience. Each time you perform a test, the tool saves the result for you so that you can review your performance history anytime you want to.
4. YSlow Plugin
YSlow is a speed check and performance analysis plugin for web browsers. It tests your website against Yahoo’s standards for high performance like minimizing HTTP requests, reducing DNS lookups, removing duplicate scripts, no 404 errors, avoiding redirects, etc. Apart from displaying webpage stats and components, it also offers suggestions to help your website perform better. This plugin is available for Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Safari and several other browsers.
5. GTmetrix
GTmetrix uses Google PageSpeed and YSlow rules to analyze your webpage. It summarizes the key indicators of your website speed like page size, load time, number of requests, etc. in an easy-to-understand manner. You can also check where your website stands compared to all other sites analyzed by GTmetrix. The basic version of this tool is free whereas the pro versions offer some additional features.
There can be various causes behind a slow running website but the most common among them are poor hosting, large file size, and heavy coding. Once you finish checking how your site is performing and pinpoint the areas that need attention, the next step is to start working on them.