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Three Great Website Performance Testing Tools in 2022

To keep your website functioning at its best, you need a variety of testing tools. Thankfully, there are dozens of great website performance testing tools online, many of them free! Here are 3 testing tools to make use of when improving your site:

Pingdom Speed Test

Website speed is everything. It’s been proven that a website that loads slowly will get significantly fewer people to stay than one that loads quickly.

Pingdom is one great, free way to quickly test your site. Simply plug in the URL you want to test, and hit Start Test. You’ll also have to select one of 6 international locations from which to run your test: San Francisco, Washington D.C., London, Frankfurt, Tokyo, Sydney, or São Paulo. This is really useful to ensure that your site is performing well for customers from a variety of locations. 

What you’ll get in return is the load time and a grade for your site. There’s much more detail below, such as the actual processes that took longer than usual to load. You’ll even get a list of top recommendations such as “Compress components with gzip” or “Use cookie-free domains” that Pingdom has determined will make the biggest difference in the performance of your site. 

This is really valuable, because it gives you something tangible to do right away to improve your site. Improving site performance, in the general sense, can be intimidating, so it’s nice to have some clear “next steps” to work on.

Google PageSpeed Insights

Another great tool for testing website performance, Google’s PageSpeed Insights lets you plug in a website’s URL and get important metrics like:

  • Time to First Contentul Paint — the time at which the first text or image is painted
  • Time to interactive — the amount of time it takes for the page to become fully interactive.
  • Speed Index — shows  how quickly the contents of a page are visibly populated.
  • Total Blocking Time — the sum of all time periods between First Contentful Paint and Time to Interactive, when task length exceeded 50ms.

As with Pingdom, you’ll see a list of “Opportunities” for improvement, which might be things like eliminating resource-blocking resources, or reducing JavaScript that isn’t actually doing anything during initial loading of the page.

An additional Diagnostics pane shows you important things. For example, you may see a message like, “Third party code blocked the main thread for 1,500 ms,” which can tip you off to review what third party plugins you have running in your homepage.

Uptrends

If you’d like to invest more in the performance of your site, Uptrends offers a much more robust testing interface than the two free options above. You can run the tests from 10 different locations, and from a desktop or a mobile phone. You can even simulate bandwidth throttling to mimic someone trying to access your site from, say, a mobile phone with a limited data reception. 

Once you build the reporting dashboard the way you want it, it becomes easy to run regularly scheduled tests for a variety of scenarios to ensure that your site is still performing at its best. 

Need some advice on site performance? Contact our support team with any questions you have! And for more tips on how to improve your website, explore our blog!

CanSpace Team

CanSpace Solutions is Canada's leading domain name registrar and web hosting provider. Keep an eye on our blog for expert information on domain names, websites, and running a business online.