Website load time is one of the most important facets of basic web development, particularity since Google has officially announced it has a direct impact on SEO.
Having said that there are a number of free online tools to test how your quickly your website loads. They also provide insightful information on a number of measures you can take to improve your loading times. A good way of comparing is to use a number of different tools and compare the results from each one. This way you will get a more wholistic view of your site’s performance.
Today, we have taken this opportunity to provide the best free online tools for website speed testing and loading times. Enjoy.
If you are a web developer or interested in learning more on improving your websites loading time, we highly recommend reading our Ultimate Guide To Improving Your Website’s Load Time.
Google Page Speed Insights
First on our list is Google’s own Page Speed Insights. This is a world trusted tool for testing and assessing your page loading times. Furthermore, because Google’s testing servers can cope with high levels of traffic your results are mostly pretty consistent. PageSpeed Insights will analyse your sites loading for both mobile and desktop, and provide you with a number of recommendations to improve performance. These suggestions are mostly pretty generic, as they are based on what is considered Web Performance Best Practices for development.
Pingdom Website Speed Test
Pingdom is an online website health monitoring service, but they also offer a number of free tools. Most notably is their Website Speed Test Tool. Their speed test tool is pretty comprehensive, and personally I actually prefer it to Google’s. You can choose a number of locations to test your website from with the ability to save your test results and compare them chronologically. Once your results are up and ready, there are host of tools to then analyze them. This is particularity handy for advanced users and web developers. One thing to watch out for is that your results may not always be accurate. Pingdom’s servers are often under heavy load as practically the entire internet uses it for testing. This means results are actually incorrect at times.
YSlow
YSlow analyzes web pages and suggests ways to improve their performance based Yahoo!’s rules for high performance web pages. Yslow is actually a browser ad-on which is available for download for Firefox, Chrome, Sarafi and Opera. Yslow is one of the most trusted website performance testers out there, however it is more for speed debugging rather than testing. Also the fact that it only a browser ad-on not a website may be inconvenient for some.
WebPageSpeedTester.com
Webpage Speed Tester is a great speed testing tool for beginners, you don’t need to be a developer to read and understand the results and it also gives you a few tips an advice on how to speed things up.
Neustar Free Web Performance Test
Neustar offers a number of website based solution services, including free online testing. Their testing tools tests from 4 servers giving you a insight into how your page loads across a number of different locations. Results are pretty good and provide a nice visual overview to your page’s loading results.
GT Metrix
Don’t get put off by the techy name, GT Metrix is actually quite user-friendly. GT metrix tests your site and provides an indexed grade on a number of different aspects of loading. It also has the added bonus of being able to compare your site with a others. The tool is useful for more generic testing and doesn’t really give you specific recommendations or improvement measures. However it does offer a number of alert functions and free automatic testing and reporting.
Load Impact
Load Impact is a great free online tool for speed testing. Test results are pretty in-depth and user-friendly. There are also a number of graphs, charts and other features to break-down your results. Overall the tests and results are pretty comprehensive.
Yottaa WebsiteTest.com
Websitetest.com is actually a pretty good tool. One of the best features is that it takes screenshots in real-time as your page loads and then displays them in your results. It’s also pretty comprehensive and has a number of features including content loading timeline with all the info you need.
WebPageTest.org
WebPageTest.org is a pretty trusted and comprehensive testing tool for any developer. It offers a number of extra tools such as comparisons and trace-route as well. You can test from multiple locations with the added bonus of being able to test under different browser conditions like Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera and iOS Safari.
iWebTools Speed Test
Finally if you are a developer of a number of websites, or maybe you just want to compare a number of different pages iWebTools Website Speed Test can test sites in batch. It doesn’t give you very detailed results, however this in not the primary function of the tool. It is designed for batch testing, which can be pretty useful.
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