Website testing and monitoring tools, Page Speed Insights
When it comes to website optimization, speed is one of the most important factors to consider. Fast websites with a fantastic, modern front-end website design will significantly contribute to the success of an online business or enterprise – Page Speed Insights Tools
Nowadays, the fast-paced internet environment necessitates that apps and tools operate at ever-faster speeds, and optimal website performance is critical.
Slow loading times and low functionality on a website can also signal its demise, which is especially dangerous if it means the demise of a business! But there is no other option – visitors become frustrated if they have to wait too long for the page to load, and they are more likely to leave and look elsewhere.
Fast loading speeds increase sales and increase visitor engagement and retention. Furthermore, a website response that feels instantaneous will result in higher conversion rates.
The Importance of Website Speed Testing
But, to have a faster website, you must first determine how much improvement is required. This is where speed testing tools come in. One of the most important first steps to improving your site’s loading times is to test its speed.
What speed testing does is allow you to set a benchmark that will help you measure the changes you intend to make to your site. It gives you a solid starting point for the direction of any planned improvements.
Your website should ideally load in less than one second wherever it is being hosted. The longest that the page load still feels instant is one second (at most).
Even though loading times vary depending on a variety of factors, such as marketing tools and other types of tracking software, you can still aim for a loading time of 1.5 seconds, which is well within the acceptable range.
Consequently, we’ve put together a list of the top and most well-known website speed testing tools you can find and use on the internet right now to help you out a little bit.
Remember: Since results can differ from test to test, it’s usually a good idea to do many speed tests and average them out.
In addition to DNS caching, CDN caching, and WordPress caching, external calls to third-party resources and API impacts may also contribute to this. So once more, to obtain the most accurate result, don’t be afraid to conduct repeated tests.
Understanding the Simple Speed Test Parameters
We’d like to briefly discuss the most crucial parameters that are present in a significant portion of speed testing tools available before we actually rank the best website speed testing tools. The following are the most crucial aspects of any speed test that you should concentrate on:
URL (or your website’s address): It’s crucial to remember to always use the site’s primary web address, which means always adding the www. The www mark is frequently overlooked, which might cause a 1- to a 2-second slowdown in your running speed.
Load Time: Most significant parameter is certainly loaded time. the goal is a page load that feels instantaneous at less than one second. Having said that, a loading time of 1.5 seconds is also not at all horrible.
Page Size: The total page size is indicated in this section. Naturally, a page’s loading speed improves with its size; an image-heavy website will typically weigh between 1 and 2 MB. It’s not unusual to see pages that are 5, 10, or even 15 MB in size, which makes them fairly slow on a typical internet connection.
Requests: Similar to the page size, fewer requests are better in this case. Most websites that are regarded as quick will have between 50 and 100 requests. H
- however, after you reach 200 requests, you’ll find that the site starts to feel extremely slow. This is particularly apparent on mobile devices, which have less CPU power available to handle all those requests.
Top Tools for Speed Testing Researchers Recommend:
- Google PageSpeed Insights
- GTmetrix
- Pingdom
- SiteSpeedBot
1. Google PageSpeed Insights
The other tools described above are website speed testing tools, however, Google PageSpeed Insights isn’t one of them. This indicates that it won’t actually give you a lot of information and advice you can use to speed up the loading of your website. Yet there are still some important justifications for checking out this Google service.
Because Google is the one who actually creates the search rankings whose top you’re hoping to achieve, Google’s results are important. Therefore, when Google discovers a problem with the functionality of a website, it is definitely worth paying attention to.
One of those tools that are simple to use is PageSpeed Insights. It only needs your site’s URL (web address), just like the other speed testing tools on this list, and generates both mobile and desktop versions of your site’s performance in a very short amount of time.
This tool gives your website a grade between 1 and 100. Therefore, the higher the number, the better your site has been optimized. A score of 85 is a good benchmark; it indicates that your website is operating fairly well.
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As we mentioned earlier, there are some suggestions for making changes to your site (though not as many as in the other testing tools). Examples include suggestions for image optimization and CSS minification.
This is what Google PageSpeed Insights measures about your site and what you need to pay attention to if you want to improve its performance:
- time to above-the-fold load: this is the time that has elapsed from the moment a new page is requested by a user, and to the moment the browser renders the above-the-fold content.
- time to full page load: the time that has elapsed time from the moment a new page is requested by a user to the moment the browser fully renders the page.
The mobile report has an additional category called “User Experience”, which is included in your site’s scoring. Included here is the size of your tap targets (buttons and links), your viewport configuration, as well as the eligible font sizes.
User Knowledge is a separate category in the mobile report that is taken into account when assessing your site. The dimensions of your tap targets (buttons and links), your viewport settings, and the acceptable font sizes are all listed here.
Data from the lab and the field are provided by the Google PageSpeed Insights test. Lab data deals with performance-related concerns, whereas field data is performance information that is available in real-time to your visitors.
Small and medium-sized organizations, as well as independent website owners searching for a simple and easy solution to maintain optimal website performance, choose and utilize this speed testing tool the most.
2. GTmetrix
Along with Pingdom, GTmetrix is a well-known speed assessment tool and one of the most popular ones on the internet. Similar to Pingdom, GTmetrix is a tool that even those unfamiliar with the complexities and mechanics of WordPress websites can use with relative ease.
Google PageSpeed Insights and YSlow data are combined by GTmetrix to produce a score and recommendations for your website. It grades your website on a scale from A to F.
Five categories make up the reports it produces: PageSpeed, YSlow, Waterfall chart, Page Load Timings, Page Load Video and Filmstrip, and Report History (page timings, page sizes, and request counts, and Google PageSpeed and YSlow Scores).
You must register for free to access the majority of these parts and other features; a GTmetrix Pro edition is also available for larger and more sophisticated websites.
With the free registration, you can do the test from seven different locations (otherwise it only gives you the one in Vancouver, Canada)
3. Pingdom
One of the most well-known speed testing tools on the internet is Pingdom. Pingdom, a Swedish company with a variety of services, is perhaps best known for its free speed testing tool.
This was our go-to speed testing tool for over a year before we decided to build our own because we felt that some of the data were lacking, such as the performance grade, which doesn’t correlate with performance, and many of the other suggestions they have that are also out of date. Don’t get us wrong, though; Pingdom is still an excellent tool for measuring speed.
Its popularity is partly a result of how simple it is to use. Because not all WordPress users are specialists in online speed or web optimization, other similar tools on the internet can frequently be quite daunting.
Here, as with most speed testing programs, you must also provide the web address (or URL) of your site and the location from which you wish the test to be run. It is ideal to pick a place that is close to the server where your website is housed.
Their speed test reports are initially divided into four sections, including performance grade, total load time, total page size, and the number of file requests, which can be further elaborated into what’s known as the waterfall analysis.
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Below the first four parts are further information and details. As a result, you have sections on content size by kind and domain, as well as requests by type and domain, giving you a nice overview of the things you need to pay attention to in order to enhance page performance.
Thus, you can easily compare the CDN asset size of your website with one of your domains, the number of requests by domain, and the types of material on your website that have received the most requests.
4. SiteSpeedBot
Let’s start by introducing you to our brand-new speed testing tool, which is just out of the oven and prepared to join the ranks of the internet’s top speed testing tools.
Recently, we concluded that the other technologies we had been using for our WordPress optimization company, WPSpeedFix, were no longer working for us.
Although Pingdom is a fantastic performance-testing tool on its own, we wanted something more and a little bit better after using it for more than a year. So we chose to create our own!
Try our tool for the website you want to test out; we highly recommend it. When it comes to suggestions for enhancing the speed of your website, SiteSpeedBot will give you thorough advice that many other speed testing tools won’t include.
Numerous important aspects of the contemporary web in 2019 are being probed and tested.
When utilizing SiteSpeedBot, you’ll notice that it offers you additional information and suggestions on HTTP2 compatibility, as well as HTTP2 push support, which is something that many other test tools just don’t provide.
Additionally, SiteSpeedBot checks several speed indicators that are significant on the contemporary web, including DNS hosting speed and TTFB.
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The first four sections or parameters provided by our tool are Page Size, Total Load Time, Number of Requests, and TTFB (time to the first byte). Naturally, you can provide more information about your page in the more complex sections, which are:
- Improve page performance – here’s where we inform you about the site’s overall performance and give you suggestions on what you need and can improve on it.
- Summary – here you can find the first four initial sections we mentioned above, along with the DNS Resolution Time (or DNS speed), SSL negotiation time, Connection Time, Wait time, and Receive time.
- Other metrics section – here you can find information about whether the server supports HTTP2 protocol, as well as HTTPS; the number of CSS files, whether your site supports Next-gen images, as well as whether you’re on a slow or a fast hosting provider, and the detection of lazy loading, among other info.
- Response codes.
- Hosting provider details.
- Image compression test – here we analyze the images on your site, their weight, as well as the potential weight-saving you can achieve by image compression
- Waterfall view.
- Content size by content type and by domain with requests by content type and by domain.
Final Conclusion: Page Speed Insights
As we mentioned at the beginning of this article, a well-optimized website can make or break the users who visit and interact with it. Having a fast website is one of the most important factors to consider as a website owner, especially if you run an online business. Making a speed test is one of the first steps you should take when optimizing your site.
A faster website is better for SEO. Google rankings can be influenced by website speed, and Google prefers faster websites. Slow sites do not rank as high as fast(er) sites, and they suffer a ranking penalty as well.
Moreover, the conversion rate may be even more crucial than traffic and rankings. Nowadays, people interact with websites lightning-fast, and they become increasingly irritated and dissatisfied with slow websites, which causes them to click away and visit another website pretty quickly if the one they’re trying to access is not almost immediately responsive.
This then has a significant effect on the website’s conversion rate, the volume of sales and calls it generates, and any other relevant metrics. In a nutshell, it goes something like this: speed has a significant impact on both traffic and conversions, which is why speed is so crucial overall.
