Page speed plays a crucial role in user experience and sale conversions of e-commerce websites. And there are many easy ways to boost your site speed that we mentioned in the previous blogs. However, before knowing how to make your site better and faster, you should test your current performance. This blog will point out the top 20 Free web speed test tools. You can use it to check your online business performance. Let’s get started!
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1. Google Pagespeed Insights
Eight years ago, Google announced that website page speed would be an essential factor for SEO ranking. At the same time, they introduced Google PageSpeed Insights. This is one of the most potent free web speed test tools to measure website performance for mobile and desktop devices. And then suggest specific ways to improve page performance.
Once you submit the URL of the website that needs testing, Google will run two analyses at the same time:
- The first one will check the loading time of the above-the-fold content. In other words, it measures the elapsed time from the moment the users request a new page to the moment the browser renders the above-the-fold content.
- The second one will measure the submitted site’s overall loading speed from the beginning to when the page is fully rendered.
As you can see, the score is in the range of 0-100 points.
The higher the score, the better optimized your site is. If you get a score of above 85, congratulations, your website is performing exceptionally well.
Compared to the desktop report, the mobile report added a new category called “User Experience,” checking the size of your buttons and links, font sizes, etc.
As you may know, Google PageSpeed Insights has been continually improving so that the score will change over time with new rules and better analysis.
2. GTmetrix
GTmetrix is another prevalent and easy-to-use web speed testing tool.
Once entering your website URL, this analysis tool will immediately scan the site and provide all you want to know about your site performance after a few minutes.
GTmetrix shows a summary at the top on the result page, listing your overall performance scores (PageSpeed & YSlow scores), fully loaded time, total page size, and the total number of requests.
Since the tool displays a list of your requests in a waterfall view, you can quickly identify current problems in your site. Moreover, this waterfall chart is allowed to be downloaded for more in-depth analysis.
Besides, similar to Google PageSpeed Insights, the GTmetrix test also suggests some possible solutions to speed up your e-commerce websites.
There are more things about GTmextrix that you might be interested in:
You can create a free account and save up to 20-speed tests, which helps compare testings for different browsers (Chrome/ Firefox), test locations, connection types (Cable/ Dial-up), and so on.
3. Pingdom
Many people have considered Pingdom as the leading free web page speed test tool in recent years.
To conduct the test, you must enter a URL and opt for one of the four available test locations: the USA (Texas & California), Australia, and Sweden.
After examining your site, Pingdom will display a summary. The report consists of the overall performance grades, the total load times, the page size, the number of requests, and a comparison of your site speed vs. other sites.
Like PageSpeed Insights, Pingdom grades the performance of your e-commerce websites out of 100.
For more details, you must scroll to the Performance insights, which indicate scores for each element and recommend specific solutions to enhance your site performance.
Besides, it’s worth noting that you can trace your website performance over time because all the speed tests will be stored in the Pingdom library.
4. Pagelocity
Pagelocity is also one of the most popular free web speed test tools nowadays.
Unlike the first three mentioned tools, Pagelocity offers insights about your page speed and your On-page SEO (source size, text size, text to HTML ratio, URL length) and code.
The maximum score for each testing aspect is 100.
Another exciting thing is that the resources view gives you the information about which assets make up your total page weight for proper adjustment.
5. Dotcom-Tools
The following useful free web speed test tool is Dotcom-Tools.
It can test website performance in 24 different locations around the world simultaneously. Therefore, it would take quite a long time to get the final results. It will then display the average loading time, the page sizes, and the number of errors from those test locations.
Moreover, you are allowed to choose a specific browser to conduct the test, e.g., Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, and select a mobile browser, e.g., Android, iOS, Windows Phone, Blackberry, etc.
After a quick inspection, you can know how your website performance is through the waterfall breakdown.
The Dotcom’s page speed test results consist of performance summary, network responses, breakdown by host element, etc.
6. YSlow
Unlike other web speed test tools on this list, YSlow is an open-source tool that helps you evaluate your site speed based on 23 Yahoo!’s rules for high-performance websites.
Besides, this tool will require a quick installation as an add-on for your browser.
YSlow will operate in 3 steps before returning the results:
- Crawling the DOM to find all components in your site (e.g., image)
- Collecting information about these components’ size (e.g., gzip, expire headers) YSlow takes
- Scoring for each rule as well as the overall one.
After testing your website performance with YSlow, you will receive the specific grades for each area (from A to F). From that, it’s easy to know which areas need your attention and improvements on your site.
7. Load Impact
Load Impact is another excellent free tool for examining your current speed and finding valuable suggestions to improve page performance. This tool will generate load from 10 checkpoints simultaneously, and you can even add more areas upon request.
After processing, Load Impact will illustrate an informative graph, presenting your page load time fluctuations when more users visit your website.
This tool sends virtual users to your site from multiple test locations to ensure that your tested website can meet global clients’ needs.
What is more? Load Impact shows statistics from bandwidth usage, the number of requests made, and the number of requests per second.
Furthermore, Load Impact provides you with five free website performance tests and reports every month.
8. Uptrends
Uptrends is another handy free web speed test. It enables us to test through 35 locations across the globe.
In terms of the analysis, Uptrends presents colorful results in the waterfall analysis for by domains. Owing to that, you can diagnose the troublesome issues of your site and handle them quickly.
Moreover, HTTP requests are the most popular monitor types of this page speed test tool. It also applies Uptime Monitoring to follow your website’s status and make sure your site loads fast all the time.
9. Geek Flare
Like some previous web speed test tools, Geek Flare allows you to check your e-commerce website’s performance from a wide range of locations at once, regardless of different devices.
After hitting the test button, you will get the results of Time to First Byte (TTFB), fully loaded time, page size, the number of requests, request counts by type, response codes & domain, etc.
10. Yellow Lab Tools
Yellow Lab Tools seem strange for some people, but it’s useful for website performance evaluation compared to other tools on the list.
More specifically, this tool offers valuable information and unique features such as viewing JavaScript interactions with the DOM during the page load and other code validation issues.
The JavaScript timeline will show you how the DOM interacts precisely while the page loads.
Finding More Interesting Free Web Speed Test Tool In Part 2…
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