You checked out your site on your desktop computer, and you said to yourself, “Well, this was awesome, my site is fast!” But, then you go on to another computer, and your site suddenly became slow.
So, how do you know exactly how fast your site is?
Well, you can use any of these four free tools to assess your site’s speed and get actionable tips on how to improve it.
- Google PageSpeed Insights (https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights)
Since Google is the top search engine in the world, then you should obviously care what Google thinks about your website. So, your first stop is Google’s very own PageSpeed Insights which will measure your site’s mobile and desktop speeds.
You get a score for page speed and optimization. Scroll down a bit, and you’ll have a bunch of optimization suggestions. If you can implement all the suggestions, then your site will have a much better chance of ranking high on Google!
- Pingdom Website Speed Test (https://tools.pingdom.com)
Pingdom is another great tool to measure your site’s speed. Just like Google PageSpeed Insights, Pingdom will also give you useful suggestions to improve your site.
You can choose from 4 locations (Melbourne, New York, San Jose, Stockholm). You get a grade for your site’s performance, and the waterfall chart makes it easy for you to spot and identify performance bottlenecks.
- GTMetrix (https://gtmetrix.com)
GTMetrix is another popular tool to check your site’s speed. Simply type in the URL of the page you want to analyze and hit enter. While free users can’t choose the server location (default is Vancouver, Canada), you’ll still be able to get plenty of ideas on how you can improve your site.
GTMetrix gives you a comprehensive analysis from PageSpeed Insights and YSlow. What’s also great about this tool is that the recommendations are sorted according to the impact it has on your site. So, you should work on the recommendations at the top of the list first and work your way down.
4. KeyCDN Website Speed Test (https://tools.keycdn.com/speed)
Last, but not least, we have KeyCDN’s speed test tool. It doesn’t give a performance grade like the other tools on this list. However, it will give you a waterfall breakdown of your site’s requests.
To know the details of each specific request, click on the request name itself and you’ll see the request header, response header, and meta information. If you want to see your site’s page size and the time it took for the entire page to load, just scroll down and you’ll find the information you’re looking for.
