7 Free Web Page Speed Tests

web-page-speed-testing

You feel the need. The need for speed. But how fast is your web page? You can look at your load time and a waterfall of your file requests with Chrome developer tools, in Safari or Firefox but that read out is limited to your own connection speed and sometimes your hosts file or cache can affect your site as well.  So outside tools are a great way to check how fast your website page will come up. These are all free although many have premium memberships that allow you to track your tests over time or monitor your site.

7 Free Web Page Speed Tests

1. Google Pagespeed Test
Most of your traffic likely comes from Google so it makes sense to check what they’re seeing. Also the test allows you to down optimized images and properly compressed or rather minified css and html.

2. GTmetrix
Gives you insight on how well your site loads and provides actionable recommendations on how to optimize it. Also includes YSlow in it’s testing.

3. WPEngine’s WordPress Speed Test
Includes a detail readout and actionable tips and tutorials on how to improve your WordPress site’s speed.  WPEngine is the top of the heap for shared hosting for WordPress and a big part of that is their built-in cacheing tools. Hosting accounts have the performance tool built in but anyone can run a test.
WordPress Speed Test

4. Pingdom Tools

Analyzes your page and finds bottlenecks plus you can test from different locations of your choice.  Performance insights, response codes and gives a waterfall of file requests sorted by load order, load time, file size, file type or URL. Pingdom is also well known for their site monitoring. 1st site is free and it’s good way to keep an eye on your hosting commpany.

5. WebPageTest

Also allows you to test from different locations but has over 40 choices. This one keeps coming up at WordPress meetups as well.

6. Sucuri Load Time Tester

This test measures how long it takes to connect to your site and for one page to fully load. A very important value to pay attention is the “time to first byte”, which gives us how long it took for the content to be sent back to browser to start processing the page. If you are using a CDN (Content Delivery Network), your connection time may be low, but if the time to first byte and total time is also not low, it will not give you much in terms of performance.

7. Pagelocity.com

This new comer to the page speed tools includes a high level on-page SEO assessment, performance and code insights.

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Photo by Paul Smith
https://unsplash.com/@sumo

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