20 free tools to test your website’s speed and performance
Google, the search engine giant is now taking websites’ loading time into serious consideration. Although experts don’t believe that it’ll greatly affect a certain site’s ranking, it’s still something that you should look into.
You just have to remember that most of your visitors are always in a rush. Even you don’t want to wait for a few minutes before the site’s page load its content. Thus, if your site’s loading time takes a century, then you’ll lose significant amount of visitors. Your visitors are your site’s traffic. And if you don’t take it seriously, the consequences will be of a domino effect.
But it’s not enough to jump into your site’s codes and try things out to improve your site’s speed. It can’t easily be done without first knowing which culprits slow down your site. Fortunately, there are online tools that can help you analyze your site and assist you in diagnosing which part of your site’s codes need modifying; thereby, giving you a better understanding on how it behaves when your user visits it.
Here’s a collection of sites that offer free speed testing tools.
1. Page Speed Online
Made and designed by Google’s team of developers, Page Speed Online analyzes your content before generating suggestions that can help in making your site loads faster.
2. Pingdom Tools
It tests the load time of your site’s objects, like iframes, HTML, images, etc. Pingdom also checks the loading time of every element of your site and offers suggestions on how to improve the items.
3. Neustar
Regardless of the site’s size and location, this tool will analyze it and show you what you can do to improve its speed. From there, you can understand your site’s performance and be able to remove the right elements that affect its overall performance.
4. Which Loads Faster?
Although it doesn’t have a complete analysis of how fast your site loads, it does help you compare whether or not your site performs better than your competitor’s site.
5. Web Page Test
Use this site to determine your site’s loading time from a certain test location. It provides multiple test locations around the world using real browsers, such as IE and Chrome. Advanced testing tools are also available to further analyze your site.
6. Web Page Analyzer
Once you’ve entered the site’s URL that you want to test, this tool will provide you results including page size, composition and download time.
7. Show Slow
You simply have to enter the URL that you’d like to monitor and the site’s tools will give you results from popular testing tools, including YSlow, Page Speed and dynaTrace. Although it’s free to use, you’ll need to register an account with them.
8. GTMetrix
It’ll grade your site’s performance based on Google’s Page Speed and Yahoo!’s YSlow results. From the results received, you’ll be able to fix any issue that hinders your site’s ability to load faster.
9. Webwait
It gives you results to benchmark your site. The results are accurate as this tool analyzes your entire site into your browser.
10. Load Impact
It’s an ideal tool if the site you want to test receives thousands of visitors each day.
11. APM Cloud Monitor
It provides 50 server locations around the world to help you find out the loading speeds of your site from those locations.
12. Gomez Networks
The results will give you DNS Lookup Time, Connection Time, First Byte, Content Download and other factors that will help you analyze your site’s loading time.
13. OctaGate
It gives you an idea on the time it takes for a user or visitor of your site to download your site’s pages.
14. Web Tool Hub
It’ll provide you essential information like page size, loading time, and CSS. Essentially, it gives you just basic page speed test.
15. Zoompf
The free scan includes analysis of single web page and allows you to have 5 scan limits. If you want thorough details, then you should sign up for its full product that requires a certain fee.
16. SEOMastering.com Site Speed Checker
It lets you test up to 10 URLs simultaneously. In this way, you’ll be able to test your site against your competitors’ sites.
17. Search Metrics
This online tool will give you results on site’s performance in terms of loading time. It also gives recommendation on whether or not there’s a need for you to change coding of your site.
18. PageTest
This is actually a plug-in that you can download to your computer. It has suggestions on how to speed up your site based on the errors it has monitored.
19. Website Pulse
It tests and measures your site’s HTML content, images and other internal web page elements.
20. Website Test
Testing options include single browser, multi-browser, multi-location and multi-connectivity webpage.
It’s important that your site’s loading time is low. In this way, your visitor won’t leave when it doesn’t load after 5 seconds. With the use of these tools, you’ll be able to diagnose which parts of your site need modification to improve site’s speed.
