6 Free Site Speed Test Tools You Need to Make Your Website Faster
Website speed is all the rage today.
Did you know that in 2014, Site Speed was voted one of the top search ranking factors?
Site speed contributes to a better user experience overall and most online businesses are finding that as they make their websites faster they get better rankings, more traffic, higher conversion rates, and ultimately more sales.
Besides our page speed blog post that offers information how to check your website page speed, here are 6 of the best free website speed test tools you can use to evaluate your website speed.
As you use these tools remember that the rule of thumb is a page should load in less than 2 seconds. Websites that rank in Top 30 positions load in less than the 1.3 second mark (SearchMetrics.com).
Tools.Pingdom.com
Use this tool to run a full page test to find the load time of each web page. This website speed test helps you analyze your page and find where slow bottlenecks occur. The tool also gives you the page load time, page size, and overall grade out of 100, plus how fast your webpage is in comparison to all tested websites.
Webpagetest.org
A favorite of our website audit experts, this free tool to test site speed gives you a score for both the first view and for the repeat view. It tells you:
- How long it takes for the first byte to load
- How long it takes to start rendering
- And the time, number of requests, and bytes required for the page to fully load
The tool also gives you a letter grade for a number of speed factors including progressive JPEGs, cache static content, keep-alive content, and compress transfer.
Pagespeed Insights by Google
Google’s tool to hep you make your web pages fast on all devices gives you a page speed score for both desktop and mobile platforms, plus a number of recommendations to increase your page speed.
Google Analytics
If you have Google Analytics set up to track your website traffic you can also see website speed for pages at specific points in time. Select “Behavior” from the left navigation and choose Site Speed Overview.
Google Webmaster Tools
If you have Webmaster Tools set up for your website you can also see your average website speed over the last three months. Look for the average speed and any major spikes in load time, which can suggest server issues. Select Crawl from the left navigation and choose Crawl Stats.
YSlow.org
This add-on is available for most browsers and grades your web page plus offers suggestions to improve the page performance. It’s a great way to quickly test speed on any webpage you may visit and is great for competitor analysis too!
Is it time to make your website faster?
Need Help with Website Page Speed?
Our Website Auditors are skilled at finding what is slowing your website down and providing prioritized lists of how to gradually improve your website speed. After all, Amazon found that a one second slow down could cost them $1.6 billion in sales each year.
What is your slow website costing you? See our post on 7 Ways to Improve Your Website Speed.
Contact us our SEO experts at 1st on the List for more information about website speed and what we can do for you.
Visit our Site Speed Optimization page for more details or call us at 1-888-262-6687.
