There’s magic in analyzing your site performance with website speed test tools!
Running a website or blog requires lots of attention. To engage your visitors and you need quality content and of course a pretty design. Of course SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is very important, but if you finally get on the first page of Google with your keywords and you’re getting visitors it is also very important to minimize page loading times. The last thing you want is for your precious visitors/readers to run away scared because of a 8 second page load time.
You can optimize your website performance in many ways (like change to a different web host, which did the trick for me) and I plan to write more about that later, but first you should check if your website requires some extra attention. Of course you can ask your friends to load your website from different locations, but you get more thorough results and analysis by using Website Speed Test tools that you can find around the internet. Let’s see if we can list a couple very good options here!
Contents
1 Pingdom Website Speed Test
The first that comes to mind is Pingdom. When you type in your page URL and hit “Test now” the free Pingdom Website Speed Test tool will start loading and analyzing your page and output a long list of results.
In the Waterfall tab you can see all loading times for all files that were loaded to display your page. You can check the time it too to get through SSL certification, how long it took to connect, if it took some time to send info from your browser, the wait time and finally how much time it took to actually download and display the file.
This will tell you a great deal about which files you could either optimize or maybe even remove completely. For example if you are using some sort of social WordPress plugin that displays a Facebook like button and you see it takes forever to load, then maybe it is time to look into alternative options.
The Performance Grade tab displays a list of grades from 0 to 100 given to a list of analysis points:
- Minimize redirects
- Leverage browser caching
- Combine external JavaScript
- Minimize DNS lookups
- Combine external CSS
- Specify a Vary: Accept-Encoding header
- Remove query strings from static resources
- Serve static content from a cookieless domain
- Specify a cache validator
- Parallelize downloads across hostnames
- Avoid bad requests
- Minimize request size
Click the arrow on the right of each check to see more details about how to improve the score.
On the Page Analysis tab of this website speed test you can see how many successes, redirects or errors were encountered when loading your page. More importantly, it also presents an overview of how much time (in a percentage of the total loading time) all file types took to load. You can get a very good idea of what is slowing down your website.
If you choose the “Save test and make it public” option (on by default, you can switch it off by clicking on “Settings” before you analyze your URL) then Pingdom collects all the tests you’ve made over time and is able to display a nice graph of how the loading times behaved so far. It’s a good motivational tool to keep improving your site.
Overall the Pingdom Website Speed Test tool makes for a very nice, free way to analyze website performance. And apart from this detailed tool you can even register for a free account that checks your website every minute and get an automatic message when your website is down. They offer more detailed automatic reports in their paid plans, starting at $8.30/month.
Check your website speed with Pingdom
2 GTmetrix
Another great option is GTmetrix. They offer similar analyses reports as Pingdom, but in my experience they go a bit further into how to fix any speed bumps. GTmetrix makes use of the powerful Google Page Speed and Yahoo! YSlow page analysis tools and presents it all in a neat tabbed layout, including all the advice you need to speed up your website.
Simply go to the front page, type your page URL and hit “GO!” to start the analysis. The tool takes about 10 seconds to get all data together and then the fun begins.
You can then use the tabs under “Breakdown” to check the different results from Google Page Speed and Yahoo! YSlow. The “Timeline” is similar to Pingdom’s “Waterfall”, which simply displays all the files that were loaded in chronological order. You can also check the History here if you’ve done more website performance tests over time.
Check your website speed with GTmetrix
3 Google PageSpeed Insights (Chrome or Firefox addon)
Most website performance analyzers use developer tools by either Google (Page Speed) or Yahoo! (YSlow). If you’re using a proper browser like Chrome or Firefox you can simply install the free Google PageSpeed Insights addon to get on-page analyses and tips about how to improve your loading times.
I must say it looks a bit better when you use it on Google Chrome as you get a bit better result overview compared to Firefox. With Chrome it works out of the box just by opening the Developer Tools in the top-right menu or clicking CMD+OPT+I on OSX or CTRL+SHIFT+I on Windows and then select the PageSpeed tab.
Go give it a try, it’s free!
- Download PageSpeed Insights addon for Chrome
- Download PageSpeed Insights addon for Firefox (Firebug addon required)
4 Yahoo! YSlow (Addon for multiple browsers)
Like Google, Yahoo! offers their developer tool as an addon for your browser. They support most different browser types (Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Opera) and I was glad to see they obviously skipped support for Internet Explorer.
The YSlow grading system works from A to F and they do checks on all kinds of different points, advising about improvements while they’re at it. It’s a solid tool, but I find it a bit annoying that it’s an extra window instead of an inline screen like the PageSpeed addon. But of course the results matter in the end .
You can download the Yahoo! YSlow addon for:
5 PageScoring
If you want to keep things simple and just want to get some grades on important site checks, then PageScoring can do the trick.
The test itself only takes a few seconds and the results are neatly displayed. First you get a simple list of analysis results about the domain:
- Domain Lookup
- Connection Time
- Page Size
- Download Time
- Average Speed
And after that that you get a chronological list of all the files that were loaded. With test I clearly noticed that the external loading of the FontAwesome CSS file took about half a second on top of the rest. When I removed this file and redid the check it actually scored half a second faster than before. Great stuff.
Check your website speed with PageScoring.com
Conclusion
When it comes to running a website, please don’t just focus on great content and a flashy design. Also take great care in giving your visitors a grand browsing experience by reducing your page load times. These website speed check tools can help you find any speedbumps that can be taken care of. How to further optimize your website loading times, I will hopefully share with you later this week.
Share your page loading results in the comments below, perhaps you can get some help here!