The secret to have an effective website not only relies on its strong & solid base, which certainly include website hosting, framework, powerful themes or functional plugins, but also on your frequent maintenance. One of the most important task to know the status of website performance is regularly test and check.
The actions provide you with real data and metrics to know how well it performs and inform if there are any unusual signals. Timely actions save you much money and further effort to solve the occurred troubles. According to Google, most sites lose half their visitors while loading. The following blog will provide you with popular tool to find out the bottlenecks in website performance.
1. Google Page Speed Insight
It gives you the real performance of your website and suggest optimization solutions. One of the most common overlooked things people always forget when testing website performance is mobile check. Nowadays, the proportion of time users surfing web via mobile has constantly increased. Your website can run well on desktop but mobile performance does not certainly has the same result. The tool gives you results on both desktop and mobile on two metrics:
- First Contentful Paint
- DOMContentLoaded
For each metric, there is a specific ranking regarding low – average – fast or good – medium – low. In equivalent to each score, the optimization solution is recommended, which may related to website server, HTML strucutre, JavsScript or CSS.
Link: Google Page Speed
2. Pingdom
About Pingdom, you can choose the location where test is carried out. If the hosting service is placed near the testing location, it may have better results. There are 4 main ones:
- San Jose, California, USA
- Melbourne, Australia
- New York City, New York, USA
- Stockholm, Sweden
The tool helps you examine all web pages, analyze the speed of each page & the whole website then define the suggestion to improve. The report is kind of details, where you have information of different content types, such as image, HTML, javascript, CSS, etc. Thanks to that you will be able to address the bottlenecks with ease. To qualify the performance, a score over 100 will be given to let you know where you are in comparison with others.
Link: Pingdom
3. Web Page Test
If Pingdom just allows you to test from 4 locations in the world, Web Page Test can run the test all over the globe using Internet Explorer and Chrome. You can test not only the overall web performance or specific pages but also the multiple transactions. It is really useful for e-commerce websites. Reports includes loading waterfall chart, pagespeed result and recommendations for improvement. They also have a forum where you can discuss and ask for more support.
Link: Web Page Test