Top 5 Free Website Speed Test Tools of 2017
Introduction
In the fast-paced Information Age it’s important to know if the speed of your website is enough to keep your visitors happy. It’s no secret that people leave a site if it’s too slow, which means a loss of business. In the race to stay ahead of your competitors’ products, services and resources, is your site measuring up? The first step in optimizing your website performance is to carry out a website speed test. There are a range of free places where you can do a speed test online. Let’s review the top 10 where you can test for errors, problems with website performance and do some general website performance monitoring and website performance comparison with your competitors.
1. WebyMon
WebyMon isn’t a big player, but it offers a super website uptime and general performance measuring tool. It can also check for critical errors with your webpages. It has a simply-to-use, sleek dashboard. It doesn’t have all the bells and whistles that some of the others have, but if you want something that does the job with no fuss, then this is a great tool to use. It’s also worth noting that this one really is free. The free Bronze package gives you all the functionality of the other packages and also there is no time limitation on how long you can use it for. Many others are free for only 30 days.
2. Google PageSpeed Insights
Google PageSpeed Insights is a website speed test tool that grades your website on a scale of 1 – 100. The higher the number the better optimized your site is. Anything above an 85 indicates that your website is doing well.
3. Pingdom Speed Test
Pingdom is one of the more well-known website speed test tools. Their reports are divided into four different sections which include a waterfall breakdown, performance grade, page analysis, and history. Pingdom’s speed test tool also allows you to test your website’s speed from four main locations including Dallas, Melbourne, San Jose and Stockholm.
4. GTmetrix
GTmetrix goes into great detail assigning your site a grade from F to A. With a free registration, you can test from seven different locations. They also let you choose the browser, Chrome vs Firefox. You can test and compare website performance against various connection types (like Cable vs dial-up).
5. WebPageTest
WebPageTest has over 40 locations to choose from and over 25 browsers (including mobile). It assigns you a grade from F to A based on different performance tests. Its report is divided into six sections which include a summary, details, performance review, content breakdown and screenshots.
