One of the most critical factors for the success of any website is speed. Not only do you rank higher in terms of SEO, you also get better conversion rates, more traffic, lower bounce rates and your visitors enjoy a much better experience overall.
There are plenty of free speed tools available and you should make use of them as often as you can.
What a Speed Test Will Tell You
Some of the more common things that speed test tools can pinpoint are:
- Fonts, plugins, and scripts that cause issues for load time
- Script minification
- Image compression
- Render-blocking
- TTFB – Testing Time to First Byte
- Analyzing load times, number of requests and page sizes
- Performance from various locations
- Rendering speed from multiple browsers
- HTTP Header Analysis
- Performance of CDN
- Checking that assets load from your CDN correctly
The Top 5 Free Website Speed Testing Tools
Now you know what you are looking for, its time to look at the top 5 of these free speed test tools:
KeyCDN
KeyCDN is fast and its lightweight, providing full details on the way your website is performing. It has 14 various locations around the world and you can choose to make your results public or keep them private.
You get a waterfall breakdown and you also get a visual preview, showing you, at a glance, the size of the requested page, the number of HTTP requests and load time. It works well on mobile devices.
Google PageSpeed Insights
This speed test tool gives your website a grade from 1 to 100. Every website owner aspires to get 100/100 but few do; obviously the higher your number is, the better your site has been optimized.
In short, if you score over 85, you’re doing alright. PageSpeed provides analysis of web and mobile site versions, providing a full report of any issues on your site.
Pingdom
Pingdom is one of the better-known speed test tools, offering reports that are set out in four sections – a waterfall breakdown, history, page analysis, and performance.
Page analysis provides details on requests per domain, what content is requested the most, size per domain and a size analysis. They have four locations for testing from and the performance insights are similar to those from Google PageSpeed.
GTMetrix
GTMetrix is another well-known tool that is very detailed. It grades your website from F to A after checking both YSlow and PageSpeed metrics. Reports are in five sections – YSlow, PageSpeed, video, waterfall, and history.
The free version offers you seven testing locations and a choice of two browsers. You can check different connection types and get a video of the analysis, so you can see where the problems are.
WebPage Test
WebPage Test is like the previous tools, but it offers more than 40 locations and more than 25 browsers, including mobile browsers. Website grading is from F to A after various tests have been carried out, including compression, how effectively you use your CDN, caching and so on.
The reports are in five sections – screenshots, content breakdown, performance review, details, and a summary. Its approach to testing is unique in that you get a first view and a repeat view, so you can see if a DNS lookup delay is just a first-time thing or a regular one. You also get advanced features like ignoring SSL certificates, disabling JavaScript and video capture.
Summary
As you see, there are plenty of tools and these are just five of them. Each is unique and has its own features and its own way of doing things.
You should get into the habit of testing your site on a regular basis, so you can set benchmarks over the course of time – this allows you to make the necessary improvements as needed.
Are there any other tools you are using that we missed here?