Best Website Speed Test Tools – As a webmaster, website speed is definitely an important thing that you always pay attention to. This issue is a priority for blog or website owners. All types of websites, starting from blogs, company-owned websites, forums, communities, and others, want to be able to load quickly. Therefore, you should know how to check website speed, of course.
Checking website speed regularly can give you a better idea of how your website is performing. You can see immediately whether the website is fast enough or not, and can find out where the problem lies. In this article, we will discuss what tools you can use to check website speed.
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What is the Importance of a Fast Website?
You may be wondering why checking website speed is so important. Therefore, you must first understand what is the importance of a website that has good performance and can load quickly. Check out some of the reasons below, OK!
1. Visitors Leaving Slow Websites
Imagine yourself as an internet user who wants to find information or buy a product through a search engine. You then come across a website that seems to give you what you want, but when you try to access it it doesn’t finish loading even after 10 seconds.
That experience must have pissed you off, right? That’s why people tend to leave slow websites even if they have good content. A research from Google shows that 53 percent of internet users in Indonesia will leave a website if it loads more than 3 seconds.
3. Visitors Prefer To Revisit Fast Websites
First impressions are important, including on your website. If on their first visit a visitor already knows that your website takes quite a long time to load, it is unlikely that they will return to visit your website or feel comfortable reading there for a long time. You certainly don’t want to lose visitors or potential customers because of this, do you?
2. Website Speed Affects SEO
There are various factors that determine how well your website ranks on Google search pages. However, did you know that website speed is one of the factors? Websites that can be accessed quickly will be preferred by Google. Conversely, a website with slow loading can be bad for your website’s SEO.
Best Website Speed Test Tools
Checking website speed is not difficult, so beginners can also do it quickly and easily. There are various tools that you can use according to your choice and needs. What are these tools? Check out the full explanation, OK?
1. Google PageSpeed Insights
Google is a search engine with the most users worldwide. Therefore, implementing website SEO is usually based on Google’s algorithm. This search engine adds website speed as an indicator for SEO.
Google has officially added this assessment indicator since 2010. That same year, they released Google PageSpeed Insights to help website owners check their website’s performance in terms of speed.
If you use Google PageSpeed Insights, your website will be assessed using a percent scale. A good average speed will get a score of 50 – 89 percent. Meanwhile, a fast website will score 90 to 100 percent. If your website rating is below 50 percent, then of course you have to fix many things so that your website can load faster.
2. Google Mobile Website Speed Testing Tool
Currently, many people access the internet via smartphones. For this reason, checking website speed on a mobile display is very important. Websites that are mobile friendly will have a greater chance of getting lots of visitors.
Google has released tools for that. It’s not much different from the Google PageSpeed Insight that we discussed earlier, it’s just that the Google Mobile Website Speed Testing Tool focuses more on assessing website speed on mobile device displays.
Not only assessing websites, but these tools will also provide various inputs that you can use as references to improve the performance and speed of your website.
3. GTMetrix
GTMetrix is the most popular and easy-to-use tool for checking website speed. Therefore, this tool is very worthy for you to try. Its use is also free and very suitable for beginners.
This one tool will help check the speed of your website in full. Starting from page size, total loading time, also the number of incoming requests. GTMetrix allows users to save analysis results and recommendations they provide.
The condition is that you have to create an account on the GTMetrix website. However, creating an account is also easy and free! This free service from GTMetrix allows you to save the last 20 speed tests.
4. Pingdom
The next way to check website speed is to use Pingdom. This tool is very popular and has many big companies as their clients. Facebook, Spotify, Pinterest and Twitter are some of the names of technology companies that use Pingdom for monitoring their websites.
Pingdom provides both free and paid services. If you just want to check website speed, you can use it for free. Like other tools, your website will score on a scale of 0 to 100. The higher the score, the better your website’s performance. Apart from that, Pingdom will also provide various suggestions to increase website speed.
5. Chrome DevTools
This tool is part of Google Chrome, Google’s browser. Usually, developers often use this tool because of its easy access. Apart from that, Chrome DevTools is also very effective if you want to do debugging or testing.
To access Chrome DevTools, you can press Command + Option + I if you’re on a Mac. Meanwhile, if you are using Windows and Linux you can access it with the keyboard combination CTRL + Shift + I. After that, you can immediately check the website speed and get a detailed report.
Chrome DevTools has excellent features that are not owned by the other tools that we have discussed before. This excellent feature is its ability to block incoming requests. This is of course very useful for limiting the overhead of the services you use for your website.
6. Geek Flares
How to check website speed on this one is new if we compare it with other tools. Geek Flare allows you to check website speed on both desktop and mobile devices. However, the report displayed by Geek Flare is not very complete when compared to the other tools we have discussed before.
Geek Flare will only display the second the content starts loading and the second the loading finishes. However, this tool is light enough to access so you can make it one of the choices.
7. Web Page Analyzer
Web Page Analyzer is a tool that you can access for free. This one tool is quite complete, so we recommend it for you to try. Web Page Analyzer can help you to check website speed at different connection speeds. This tool can also analyze the composition of your website and provide various recommendations to improve website performance and speed.
8. WebPageTest
The developer of WebPageTest is an engineer from Google named Patrick Meenan. With this background, you can certainly assume that these tools are trusted and reliable.
You can use WebPageTest for free to check website speed from various countries in the world. This tool also has several additional features such as blocking content, comparing first view and repeat view, and others.
9. KeyCDN Website Speed Test
KeyCDN is a free tool that can easily analyze your website speed. This tool will display a preview of each page and the results of the analysis.
The results of the analysis using KeyCDN are quite complete and contain various technical matters such as GET/POST, HTTP status code, total download time, and so on.
10. Load Impact
To use Load Impact, you must first register on the website. This tool has quite a lot of users and can provide various analyzes and recommendations for increasing website speed. If you use a free service from Load Impact, you can check website speed a maximum of five times a month. To use the full features of this tool, you can subscribe to the premium version with prices starting at 89 USD per month.
Closing
That’s an explanation of how to check website speed and also tools to check your website speed. In improving the performance of the website you have. We need to remember that you should do this regularly as a website owner, so that your website is always maintained, up to date , and has good performance.
The various tools that we have discussed in this article apart from providing an analysis of how fast your website is, also provide recommendations on what needs to be improved from the website. You can start making various repairs based on these recommendations. Good luck!