Having a fast website is important for both visitors and Search Engines. If your site takes too much time to load, you’ll definitely lose some potential visitors. They may won’t come back again.Plus it is also an important factor in Google Search Engine Rankings. Google always try to serve the best results to their users and slower sites are not the best ones. Though it’s not a must for SEO but still a good practice.Your site speed and performance depends on many things. Like – good hosting provider, Server load, server performance, size of the page, technology used to create the site, number of files, images, css etc.
Before reducing your site’s load time; you need to know which things are causing problems and which issues need to be optimized. So here on this post, you’ll find tools to check out your website speed and performance.
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Tools to Check Website Speed and Performance
There are hundreds of tools available online for this purpose but not all of them are great and resourceful. Here are three tools I have used myself and found quite good.
On this post you’ll only know which tools you can use to check website performance. We’ll later write in-depth posts on how you can optimize your website for the best performance.
1. PageSpeed Insights from Google
This is a website performance checking tool from Google developers. This tool will show you – how your site is performing and how you can improve it following their instructions.
Go to this URL - https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights. You’ll find a field to insert your URL. Put your URL and Click on ‘Analyze’ button.
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| PageSpeed Insights |
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| PageSpeed Insights Results |
2. Pingdom Website Speed Test
his is another good tool to check website Speed and performance. There are some extra features which you won’t find in Google Page Speed Insights.
Go to this URL – http://tools.pingdom.com/. You’ll see a field to put your URL. Below that there’s a setting button. Click on that. You can select from which place they should check your site.
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| Pingdom Website Speed Test |
Now put your URL on the box and click on Test Now. The test will start and you’ll see this message – “Hang on, starting test…”. Then you can see the test going on.
After a while the test will be completed and you can see the result. Like I’ve got this -
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| Pingdom Speed Test results |
Just Like PageSpeed Insights, Pingdom gives you a grade. I got 81 out of 100. They also show the page size and number of requests sent to the server.
Below that they show how fast your site is than others’. My one is faster than 52% of all tested websites. You can see four tabs underneath – Waterfall, Performance Grade, Page Analysis and History.
Waterfall – This will show the size of the files on the page and their loading time.
Performance Grade – Here you can see factors analyzed on which site performance depend.
Page Analysis – This tab shows Server Errors, Re-directions or Connection Errors data.
History – If you’ve checked your site speed with this tool before, this will show the history as a chart.
3. GTmetrix Website Speed And Performance Optimization
GTmetrix is another good and one of my favorite speed checking tool. They do an in-depth optimization of sites and give suggestions to how to make them faster.
Go to this URL - http://gtmetrix.com/ and put your URL. Now click on the ‘Go’ button. It will take few seconds to check your site.
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| GTmetrix Website Speed Check |
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| GTmetrix Speed Test Results |
Here they give grades to sites. YSlow is Yahoo’s guideline or method to speed up a site. GTmetrix utilize that and show how you can speed up your site.
‘Timeline’ under Breakdown shows which file took how much time to load. If you checked your website speed with them before you can find them under History tab.
If you are running your site on WordPress CMS, they have some WP Optimization Tips. You can follow them for better results. You can also know how to reduce load time using optimized images.
You can also Re-test the page speed or compare it to another URL from ‘Options’ on the left side. Their suggestions to speed up any site is quite good. I followed many of them and was able to reduce the load time of my site.
courtesy roadtoblogging.com
