The goal of every website owner is to get traffic to their site, and site speed plays an important role in this. If a site loads quickly, visitors are more likely to stick around, read your content, and ultimately convert. But if your website takes too long to load, you risk losing the attention that you commanded enough to convince a person to visit your site. Long page load time can increase your bounce rate, the rate at which users exit your site before clicking through to another page on your site.
Additionally, website speed is a significant factor in Google’s algorithm. Fast-loading websites can expect to rank higher in the SERPs. The faster the site, the more chances you’ll have at landing on the highly coveted first page. When using a web load test tool, it’s important to keep as many variables as constant as possible, including testing with the same location. Also run the test again and again, you might get different results each time, so it’s important to run it more than once until you have consistency.
Here are the top 10 best website speed test tools.
Pingdom Website Speed Test is designed to help make your site faster by identifying what about a webpage is fast, slow, too big, and so on. Multiple test locations mean you can test your site’s speed from different locations globally. Ensure your page loads on time, every time with deep analysis of every single site element (HTML, JavaScript, CSS, etc.) as often as every 30 minutes.
2. Google PageSpeed Insights
PageSpeed Insights is a tool from Google that analyzes the content of a web page, then generates suggestions to make that page faster. The tool reports on the performance of a page on both mobile and desktop devices, and provides both lab and field data about a page. Lab data is useful for debugging performance issues, as it is collected in a controlled environment.
3. Google Test My Site
Test My Site is a no charge tool provided by Google which assesses the speed of your mobile site and provides recommendations to enhance your mobile site experience. The tool uses data from Lighthouse to offer custom recommendations to improve your page speed and site speed along with best practices and recommended resources to improve your overall experience based on what matters to customers/visitors.
4. Google Analytics Site Speed
Google Analytics Site Speed reports show how quickly users are able to see and interact with content. You can identify areas that need improvement, and then track the extent of those improvements. Page Timings report lets you perform detailed analysis of individual page performance. Site Speed Suggestions are optimization tips tailored to your site. You can implement these tips to make your pages load faster. User Timings report lets you perform detailed analysis of individual resource performance (e.g., images, videos, buttons).
No changes to the tracking code are necessary to see data in the Page Timings and Speed Suggestions reports. The User Timings report requires additional setup. To see the Site Speed reports follow these steps.
- Sign in to Google Analytics
- Navigate to your desired account, property, and view
- Click ‘Admin’
- Use the ‘ACCOUNT’, ‘PROPERTY’, ‘VIEW’ menus to select or search for the desired account, property, and view
- Open ‘Reports’
- Proceed to ‘Behavior’
- Then select ‘Site Speed’
5. Google Lighthouse
Google Lighthouse is an open-source, automated tool for improving the quality of web pages. You can run it against any web page, public or requiring authentication. It has audits for performance, accessibility, progressive web apps, SEO and more. You can run Lighthouse in Chrome DevTools, from the command line, or as a Node module.
To open Google Lighthouse using Chrome DevTools follow these steps.
- Download Google Chrome for Desktop
- In Google Chrome, go to the URL you want to check the site speed for
- Right-click an element on the page and select ‘Inspect’ to jump into the ‘Elements’ panel. Or press Command+Option+C (Mac) or Control+Shift+C (Windows, Linux, Chrome OS)
- Click the ‘Lighthouse’ tab
- DevTools shows you a list of audit categories. Leave ‘Performance’ or all of them enabled
Click ‘Generate report’
After 30 to 60 seconds, Lighthouse gives you a report on the page including the speed of the website under ‘Performance’ audit category
6. WebPageTest
WebPageTest allows you to run a free website speed test from multiple locations around the globe using real browsers and at real consumer connection speeds. You can run simple tests or perform advanced testing including multi-step transactions, video capture, content blocking and much more. The results will provide rich diagnostic information including resource loading waterfall charts, page speed optimization checks and suggestions for improvements.
7. GTmetrix
Dareboost provides an installation-free, single-click service to test the speed of any given web page. It allows you to run highly configurable and realistic tests reproducing the exact same conditions as your real-life users. From screen resolution to bandwidth or latency, you can set various testing conditions and hence replicate the very browsing conditions of your most strategic categories of users.
8. KeyCDN Website Speed Test
KeyCDN Website Speed Test tool is a full page speed test that can be performed from different locations around the world. It allows the performance of any HTML page to be tested and measured. The results returned will give a breakdown of the requests, content size, and loading time. In addition there is a complete waterfall that details the timings and HTTP headers of each asset. The tool can be used to evaluate the performance of your website to see where improvements can be made.
9. Dareboast
Dareboost provides an installation-free, single-click service to test the speed of any given web page. It allows you to run highly configurable and realistic tests reproducing the exact same conditions as your real-life users. From screen resolution to bandwidth or latency, you can set various testing conditions and hence replicate the very browsing conditions of your most strategic categories of users.
10. Uptrends Website Speed Test
Uptrends Website Speed Test gives you a snapshot of how your desktop or mobile users experience your webpage. You get everything you need to make smart performance-related decisions about your website and its content. You can adjusts location, browser, device, bottleneck throttling, and even screen size to get detailed insights of your website.
