5 Free Tools to Check Your Website’s Page Speed

Written by: Hosting Coupons on June 1, 2014

If you’re reading this, you’re probably in one of two situations:

  1. You realize that your website could have a much faster load time, but you’re not sure where to start and which areas would benefit the most. Whether it be compressing images, reducing the number of HTTP requests or just placing less content on each page.
  2. You’ve made improvements to your site, and you want to check and see if they are making a difference.

No matter which of these two situations you’re in, one or more of the following tools should be able to help. There are many improvements you can implement to help make pages on your website load faster, but to actually see if they’re making a difference you should use a tool.

 

Pingdom Tools

Known for their website monitoring service, Pingdom also offer a few handy tools to help your website.

Run their Full Page Test by simply entering your website’s URL (in this case, google.com), and it’ll run a quick test for you, presenting you with a simple box in addition to a more detailed breakdown of the elements that were loaded.

PingdomTools_screenshot

The more detailed ‘waterfall’ chart can be useful to web developers who are interested in finding bottlenecks causing slow page load speed. Here’s a screenshot, which in this case shows HTML, CSS, image, and script files.

PingdomTools_screenshot_waterfall

The other services they offer include a DNS Health check and Ping / Traceroute testing. All of which are completely free to use!

Google PageSpeed Insights

Offered by Google as a free tool for web developers, PageSpeed Insights offers a more basic overview, with a focus on giving more actionable points rather than just showing a chart with load times of different elements – which might be confusing if you don’t know what to look for.

GooglePageSpeedInsights_Google

 

GTMetrix.com

This is another popular free tool, which has slightly more options than the rest, offering additional features such as:

– Ability to throttle connections to see what performance would be like on slower connection or 2G, 3G, 4G etc.

– Monitor URLs on an ongoing basis, with graphs to show performance change over time.

GTMetrix_screenshot

Again, it’s possible to see a more detailed breakdown of elements, though not in the ‘waterfall’ style as with Pingdom, but instead giving each point a grade.

GTMetrix_PageSpeed

WebPagetest.org

Offering a more ‘retro’ feel, this site again follows the method of Pingdom by displaying a simple set of scores along with a ‘waterfall’ chart showing more detail.

WebPagetest_screenshotHere’s a screenshot of what you can expect to see on the ‘waterfall’ view.

WebPagetest_screenshot_waterfall

LoadImpact.com

This tool offers a different twist compared to the four other tools mentioned above. Instead of testing with a single ‘user’, Load Impact instead generate load in the form of users to see how your website copes under pressure. They offer a free test with up to 50 simultaneous users, but charge for more advanced tests with more users.

LoadImpact_screenshot_testinprogress

Once the test has completed, which takes around 5-10 minutes, you’ll see a graph which shows how your website copes with load (in the form of page visits) over time.

LoadImpact_screenshot_chart

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