Online users have less patience to wait for any website that takes a huge time to load. They often avoid visiting these websites, which negatively impacts the performance of the website. A slow website not only minimizes potential customers but also can affect its search engine rankings.
Therefore, it’s important to make sure that your website is fully optimized for speed. Your website should be lightweight and should not take more than 3 seconds to load.
But, the question is, how will you test the speed of your website?
Well, there are numerous tools you will come across to check the speed of your website. These tools not only help you check the speed of your website but also help you find areas of improvement as well.
Before we discuss here several free website speed test tools to check the website’s speed, let’s discuss some basics.
Table of Contents
- Why Website Speed is Highly Important
- Top 5 Free Website Speed Test Tools
- Conclusion
- Frequently Asked Question
Why Website Speed is Highly Important
Website speed is all about the time that your website takes to load and display content in front of users. This makes it clear how the loading speed of any website plays a vital role in improving the user experience. As mentioned, a good website speed is highly important for SEO and thus the online success of any business.
Many studies already revealed that even a one-second delay in loading any website results in a significant decrease in sales, conversion, and revenue. If any website loads slowly, it makes visitors impatient and they leave the website in the middle of its loading, which increases its bounce rate as well. And we all are aware of the fact that a higher bounce rate is not good for search engine optimization.
On the contrary, those websites that load fast can easily attract and engage users and thus improve the performance of websites with a higher conversion rate.
Top 5 Free Website Speed Test Tools
Now let’s discuss here some of the popular free website speed test tools that help you test the overall loading speed of your website along with their features. With the help of these tools, you can explore crucial insights along with various actionable recommendations that help you improve them. Be it a developer, website owner, or digital marketer, anyone can leverage this tool to check the speed of a website with an improved experience.
1. Google Page Speed Insight
While talking about some of the tools to check a website’s speed, it’s vital to start with none other than Google PageSpeed Insights. Since the tool is from Google, you have every reason to trust its result. With the use of the tool, you can get a detailed insight into the speed and performance of your website.
Be it a desktop or mobile version, Google Page Speed Insight is capable of measuring both versions of your website. It yields scores ranging from 0 to 100. The tool also provides you with certain recommendations to enhance the performance of your website.
More and more, it also provides certain valuable suggestions in terms of the way of optimizing images, leveraging browsing cache, and also minimizing server response time.
Features
Performance metrics
Scoring for page speed
Suggestion for optimization
User experience analysis
2. WebPage Test
It’s another website speed testing tool that you can consider using for getting a complete analysis of the performance of your website. It targets different locations worldwide when it comes to measuring the speed and performance of your website and provides you with detailed reports accordingly.
Apart from this, it also provides numerous recommendations to enhance the performance of your website, including compressing files, optimizing images, and also reducing HTTP requests.
Features
Monitor the website for mobile performance
Determine layout shifts in the filmstrip view
Recommendation and scoring
Largest contentful paint
3. GTmetrix
GTmetrix is another reliable tool that you can try to check the speed of your website. All you need to do is to enter the URL of your website to get the complete report along with the performance grade.
It lets you check the full load time of your website and also several issues that you should address and the types of resources that consume the most server load.
For instance, if the tool highlights issues that need to be fixed for your website to avoid enormous pay loading, it also gives you a complete list of URLs on your website that you need to fix.
GTmetrix works similarly to Page Speed Insights and also reflects whether you fail or pass Google’s Web Core Vitals. With the tool, you can test your website on a range of devices and also browser combinations.
Features
GT Alerts
Activity dashboard
Data visualization
Real-time analytics
Performance metrics
Virtual analytics
Real-time data
4. YSlow
YSlow is another free tool to check a website’s speed, which is capable of measuring the loading speed of your website with higher accuracy. It gives you a detailed report and also performance grades ranging from A to F. As one of the leading tools, it also provides various recommendations for enhancing the performance of the website.
Features
Get suggestions to improve page performance
Grading for a web page based on the user-defined or predefined rule set
Summarize page components
Display page statistics
Tools for performance analysis
5. Pingdom
Pingdom is another reliable tool that provides a complete suite of multiple website monitoring tools including a Website Speed Test tool, Application Monitoring tool, and Uptime Monitoring tool.
The website Speed Test of Pingdom is one of the most interesting tools, which helps users analyze websites from different parts of the world. For instance, you will be able to test the way your website performs for users living in different places across the world.
When you enter the URL of your website in this tool, it looks up information regarding your hosting, DNS, and the web server. It also helps you get a website grade along with a score that ranges from 0 to 100. The score works as an indication in terms of where your website stands actually when compared to your competitors.
Pingdom also gives you detailed actionable insight in terms of various measures that you can take to improve the speed of your website. It lets you see various important things including unnecessary redirects, images that should be compressed, and various HTTP requests.
You can also use Pingdom with other tools present in the list to gather deeper insights in terms of improvement areas of your website. It’s available with paid service as well, which monitors your website constantly and prevents it from dangerous situations.
Features
Transaction monitoring
Analyze root causes
Monitor page speed
Send immediate alerts
Uptime monitoring
Conclusion
Any website can’t become successful without having a fast loading speed. Above are some of the most prominent tools to check a website’s speed. Each of these tools includes its own set of advantages and disadvantages. So, it’s advisable to use a combination of these tools to do a comprehensive analysis of the performance of your website.
