Check out these three Free Website Speed Test sites to find opportunities to make your website load faster.

 

Completely Free Website Speed Test Tools

Here are the top three Free Website Speed Test Tools I like the most – GTmetrix, Google PageSpeed Insights, Pingdom. There are a lot more tools out there but these three are the ones I count on the most.

Google PageSpeed Insights

Google PageSpeed Insights is a website speed test tool that grades your website on a scale of 1 – 100. The higher the number the better optimized your site is. Anything above an 85 indicates that your website is performing well. PageSpeed gives you reports for both the desktop and mobile versions of your site. You can view recommendations for improvements such as you need to minify CSS or optimize your images.

PageSpeed Insights measures how the page can improve its performance on:

• time to above-the-fold load: Elapsed time from the moment a user requests a new page and to the moment the above-the-fold content is rendered by the browser.
• time to full page load: Elapsed time from the moment a user requests a new page to the moment the page is fully rendered by the browser.

 

A mobile report includes an extra category called “User Experience” that is included in the scoring of your site. This includes checking your viewport configuration, size of your tap targets (buttons and links), and also eligible font sizes.

 

Pingdom Speed Test

Pingdom is probably one of the more well-known websites speed test tools. Their reports are divided into four different sections which include a waterfall breakdown, performance grade, page analysis, and history.

 

About Pingdom

Pingdom offers cost-effective and reliable uptime and performance monitoring for your websites. They use more than 70 global polling locations to test and verify our customers’ sites 24/7, all year long. With Pingdom, you can monitor your website’s uptime, performance, and interactions for a better end-user experience. Your customers will thank you.

Nobody Likes a Slow Website – Pingdom built this Website Speed Test to help you analyze the load speed of your websites and learn how to make them faster. It lets you identify what about a web page is fast, slow, too big, what best practices you’re not following, and so on. We have tried to make it useful both to experts and novices alike.

 

GTmetrix

This is my favorite Free Website Speed Test Tool, GTmetrix goes into great detail as it checks both PageSpeed and YSlow metrics, assigning your site a grade from F to A. Its reports are divided into five different sections including PageSpeed, YSlow, waterfall breakdown, video, and history.

With free registration, you can test from seven different locations. They also let you choose the browser, Chrome vs Firefox. You can test and compare website performance against various connection types (like Cable vs dial-up) to see how it affects your page loads. Other advanced features include a video playback to analyze where your bottleneck is occurring and also the ability to run Adblock plus. With ads disabled, you can see how they affect the loading of your site.

Note: It is recommended to make a free account as you will get additional options, such as those mentioned above. I like getting the automated reports.

 

Track performance with monitoring, graphs, and alerts

• Keep track of page performance with scheduled monitoring and visualize it with interactive graphs. Set up alerts to notify you when your page performs poorly.
• Monitor pages and run a test daily, weekly or monthly to ensure optimal performance
• Visualize performance with 3 graphs available: Page Load Time, Page Size & Request Counts and PageSpeed and YSlow scores
• Zoom, pan and set a date range to find specific performance history
• Annotate areas of interest on your graph and give your data context
• Set alerts with numerous conditions based on PageSpeed/YSlow scores, Page load time, Total Page size, etc

 

 

Chrome DevTools

Chrome DevTools is a set of web developer tools built directly into the Google Chrome browser. DevTools can help you edit pages on-the-fly and diagnose problems quickly, which ultimately helps you build better websites, faster. Click on the three dots in the upper right corner of Chrome > more tools > Developer tools > generate report.

 

 

 

I recommend all of these. Try each one and find the one you like best or use two or three of them to compare results and build a faster, better website. If you think you found a better free one, drop us a line on our contact page and I will take a look. I’ll even give you credit if I do a post on it.