Do you want to do a website speed test and improve the performance of your site
There are a lot of website speed testing tools that you can use. However, many of them show the results in a technical way that is not easy for inexperienced users in the field of technology to understand or use.
In this article, we will show you how to properly conduct a website speed test and the best tools for conducting your own speed tests.
The best tools for conducting a website speed test
There are a lot of free and paid WordPress site speed tests and performance monitoring tools that you can use. Each of them has some remarkable features that distinguish them.
You don’t just need to test your website with one tool. You can use multiple tools and take multiple tests to be accurate.
However, we recommend that users use these tools only to improve the performance of their websites. Trying to get a perfect score or score on these tools is often very difficult and in most cases completely impossible for websites that work in the real world.
Your goal should be to improve the loading speed of your page for users, so that they can enjoy a faster and more consistent user experience on your website. The goal should not be to get a perfect score on a particular exam.
Having said that, let’s take a look at the best tools for conducting a website speed test.
1. IsItWP website speed testing tool
IsItWP free website speed test tool is the most suitable website speed test tool for beginners.
It allows you to quickly check the performance of your website, run multiple tests, search the results to find out what is slowing down your website.
You can also get neatly organized optimization suggestions. You can click on each category to see what steps you can take to troubleshoot performance issues. The website also provides server uptime monitoring and other useful tools for website owners.
2.MonsterInsights
MonsterInsights is the best analytics plugin for WordPress . It makes it very easy to set up Google Analytics without editing the code.
The Add-On includes a site speed report, which helps you measure the speed of your mobile and desktop website.
MonsterInsights shows the overall result of the speed of your site and also other metrics to improve the user experience. You can see the report inside your WordPress dashboard and you don’t have to leave your site.
The best part about using MonsterInsights is that it displays a goal for each metric that you should be targeting. In addition, you can also get suggestions on how to improve each metric and make your website load faster.
3. Pingdom
Pingdom is one of the most popular website performance monitoring tools. It is easy to use and allows you to select different geographical locations for a really useful test.
The results are presented with an easy-to-understand overview, followed by a detailed report. You get suggestions to improve the performance at the top and individual resources as they load.
4.Google Page speed Insights :
Google Page speed Insights is a website performance monitoring tool created by Google. It gives you website performance reports for both mobile and desktop views.
You can switch between these reports and find some common issues between both reports and others that Google recommends fixing in the mobile view.
You can also get detailed recommendations for each issue, which is useful for developers. However, the utility itself is a bit scary for novice users and non-developers.
5.GTmetrix :
GTmetrix is another powerful tool for testing website speed. It allows you to test your website using popular tools such as Pagespeed and YSlow. You can change your geographic location and browser by creating an account.
It displays detailed reports with a brief summary of the results. You can switch between the two tools and view recommendations. Clicking on each recommendation will provide you with more details.
6.Web Page Test :
The Web Page Test tool is another free online speed test tool that you can use. It’s a little more advanced than some of the other tools on our list.
However, it allows you to choose a browser and a geographical location for your tests.
By default, the test is run 3 times to get the results of your website speed test. It shows a detailed view of each result that you can click to expand and view the full report.
7.K6 (formerly Load Impact) :
K6, previously known as Load Impact, is slightly different from other website speed test tools on this list. It allows developers and engineering teams to see how your website slows down when more visitors arrive at the same time.
It is a paid service with a limited free test, which allows you to send up to 3000 virtual users within 3 minutes. The paid version allows you to test larger traffic loads. This helps you test the Website Speed test, while also testing how increased traffic affects your website.
8.Uptrends :
Uptrends is another free tool for testing site speed. It allows you to select a geographic region, a browser, switch between mobile and desktop tests.
The results are simple and easy to understand because they also show the speed points of your Google pages in the summary. You can scroll down for details and comb through your resources to understand performance issues.
How to properly conduct a website speed test?
Conducting website speed tests is not guaranteed to tell you exactly about the performance of your website.
As you can see, the internet is like a highway. Sometimes there is more traffic or congestion that may slow you down. At other times, everything is clear, and you can turn it on more quickly.
There are many other factors that may affect the quality and accuracy of your results. It is important to thoroughly conduct these tests before starting data analysis.
Let’s see how to properly conduct a website speed test to get more accurate results.
1. Take multiple tests
There are many factors that can affect your test. Although most website speed testing tools work via the cloud at maximum internet speeds, each test will show you slightly different results.
The most important difference you will notice is the time it takes to download the full web page. We recommend taking at least 3 Tests to get a more accurate picture.
You can then get an average result and use it to determine whether your website needs improvement or not.
2. Testing from different geographical locations
If most of your customers visit your website from Asia, then testing the speed of your website using servers located in the United States will not be ideal.
The test results will show you a different user experience than actual users feel when they visit your website.
That’s why you need to use Google Analytics to find out where users are coming from. After that, use this information to determine a geographical area for your tests.
For example, if you learn that most of the users of your website come from Europe, choosing a test server in Germany will give you the earliest results.
If your website visitors are from all over the world, you can take multiple tests to see how your website’s performance differs in different regions.
3. Make sure your website caching is turned on
Be sure to turn on the caching of your website before performing tests. This will allow you to test the caching of the website and how effective it is in improving performance.
The problem now is that some caching solutions store the cache only when the user requests the page. This means that creating a cache takes some time and may expire by the time you run the tests.
That is why we recommend using WP Rocket . It is the best caching plugin in WordPress that allows you to set up the WordPress cache in a few clicks and without learning technical things.
The best part is that it proactively builds the cache of your website, which greatly improves the performance of your website.
4. Check the performance of the website firewall / CDN service
Although WordPress caching plugins can do a lot, they definitely have their limitations. For example, it cannot block DDOS attacks and brute force attempts. It also does nothing against spambots which means wasting server resources a lot.
Now, all the files of your website are usually served from the same server. You can improve this by adding a CDN service to your website. We recommend using MaxCDN (by StackPath), which is the best CDN solution for beginners.
The CDN service allows you to service static website files such as images, style sheets and text through a network of servers spread all over the world. This reduces the server load on your website, makes it load faster, and improves the user experience for all your users.
Running the CDN service and firewall will significantly improve the test results.
Understand the results of the site speed test
The most important factor you should look into is the time it takes for your website to load.
It is this parameter that affects users the most. If your website takes longer to load, users may decide to press the back button, have a bad impression of your brand, and consider your website to be of low quality.
If it takes more than two seconds for your website to load, take a look at the navigation reports. Find out which resources take the longest to load.
Usually these are images, style sheets, texts uploaded from third-party websites, video embeds, etc. You may want to make sure that these images are provided from your cache or CDN service.
You may also want to pay attention to how long it takes the server to respond to each request and how long it takes to deliver the first byte.
And you also want to make sure that browser compression (also called gzip compression) is working. This reduces the size of files between your server and the user’s browser by compressing them.
If your page contains a lot of photos and videos, you may need to consider deferred loading techniques which are also called slow loading . This allows content to load when the user scrolls down and only loads the content that is visible on the user’s screen.
As always, you definitely want to make sure that your photos are optimized for the web with the image compression tool .
The second important one you want to test is TTFB (time until the first byte). If your web server constantly displays a slower time for the first byte, you may need to talk with your web hosting company.
Major hosting companies such as Bluehost, SiteGround and WP Engine have their own caching solutions. Running a caching solution for your host may significantly improve TTFB results.
We hope that this article helped you learn how to properly conduct a website speed test and the best tools for conducting your tests.