Everyone wants fast-loading websites in today’s internet, both website owners and their users. It doesn’t really matter if you have quality content when you are unable to deliver it to your users as quickly as possible. The longer it takes for the site to load, the more likely the visitor will leave your website. Consumers no longer have the patience to wait long periods of time to download something or load a web page because they have been spoiled by new technologies that have significantly improved the load speed. If until the year 2000 customers were satisfied with a loading speed of up to 8 seconds or more, after 2006 a third of them abandoned the sites that were not loaded in 4-5 seconds. At present, consumers no longer have the patience to wait for a website to load for more than 2-3 seconds.
In this article, we will demonstrate a few tools that are free to use and will help you test the loading speed of your website or web app.
Free tools to test the loading speed of the site
There are many useful tools on the Internet that help you perform speed tests not only by checking how fast your site is loading, but it also offers suggestions on how to improve the website loading speed.
Here we present 2 such useful tools that will offer you in a short time a reasonably detailed analysis of the site being tested:
Pingdom
Pingdom is one of the most famous testing tools because it provides performance score information, compares the site with other sites tested by other users, allows testing the speed from different locations (Melbourne, New York, San Jose, Stockholm to name just a few – for websites that have the majority of visitors in Europe, we recommend that tests be done by selecting Stockholm as the test location). The report is generated with the analysis highlighting areas of interest for improvement, as well as the time and the loading order of the items on the page.
Google PageSpeed Insights
Google PageSpeed Insights is very popular especially for diagnosing and fixing loading issues for displaying websites on mobile devices. The results are shown in separate tabs for desktop and mobile devices. Each tab provides a score of 0 to 100 and a list of possible optimizations to perform.
Interpretation of test results
Each of the two tools described above performs the tests according to their procedures, and it is possible that the test results differ in both the scores and the load times and the optimization suggestions. It should also be noted that the total time of the site depends on the server response but mostly on the application (WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, Prestashop, etc.) and the content to be displayed (text, images, code).
Improve Server Response recommendations refer to the entire load time.