Optimizing the website for speed is essential for both SEO and a good user experience.
To do that, we need to know about the right tools to audit your site. In this article, we will look at some of the free tools that can measure your website’s loading speed.
What to know, When Checking Website Speed
1. Fully website loaded time
2. Image optimization – are they properly compressed?
3. is there any slow external requests.
Tools for Checking Website Speed
GTmetrix is my first tool when I want to check the loading speed of any website. There are mainly three reasons why I prefer this tool:
A. Test from seven locations from five continents.
B. Detailed waterfall and timing.
C. Useful insights to improve loading speed, based on Google PageSpeed.
As a guest user, you can only test from one location – Vancouver, Canada. But after signing up for a free account, GTmetrix allows testing from all seven locations. Except for Africa and the Middle East, these locations cover almost all regions of the world. It gives you a fairly good idea of how your site performs from different parts of the world.
The free account also allows saving reports for later reference.
Reports
KeyCDN is a content delivery network provider. They give a suite of five performance testing tools
A. Website Speed Test
B. Performance Test
C. HTTP Header Checker
D. HTTP/2 Test
E. Brotli Test
you just enter the URL of the resource you want to check and it will return the TTFB from ten different locations around the world.
The tool shows fast TTFBs in green color. So, out of the ten locations, if the majority are not in green.
3. Pingdom Tools
Pingdom is another free tool that is similar to GTmetrix. It too allows testing your loading speed from seven different locations.
Pingdom is a freemium tool. Most of the speed test you see in my hosting reviews are with the free version of Pingdom.
4. Dotcom Tools
It shows only the TTFB and connect speed. Not the fully loaded time. This will give you a browser on which you can test. like the below image.
Google PageSpeed is a performance auditing tool that measures the perceived loading speed based on the different metrics.
Based on monitoring real users. While GPSI is an online tool, you can access the same tool in your Chrome Developer Tools as well.
Conclusion
I hope you’ve got an overview of the tools available out there to check your site’s speed. But also remember this is not only the 5, but lots of all are also available, you can find on the internet. If you find please comment that name in the comment box.
Thanks.