16 Best Tools to Test Your Website Speed and Improve Ranking

Make speed your ally as every second counts!

Amidst the ever-growing competition, website speed carries a lot of responsibility for any business or brand that wants to maintain its position online. Think of it as a sprinter in a race, the faster it starts, the better the chances of winning. One loading at a snail’s pace can lead to higher bounce rates & lower search engine rankings, ultimately reducing traffic and revenue. As you want to test and check the speed & performance of your website, we have picked the best tools for you.

Best website speed testing tools 

Best Website Speed & Performance Test Tools

Typically measured in seconds, website speed, or website load time, is the measurement of how fast the content of a web page loads and displays to the visitor. Moreover, it also provides insights into factors such as page design and back-end code, that may be impeding speed. Now the metric has a significant impact on user experience and SEO rankings. Search engines such as Google consider page speed as a ranking factor.

TOOL NAME FEATURES RATING OUT OF 5 PRICING
Google PageSpeed Insights Offers both Desktop and Mobile website testing 4.9 Free
Pingdom Global testing locations, Real-time monitoring 4.7 Starts at $10/month
GTmetrix  Provides a PageSpeed Score and a YSlow Score  4.7 Starts at $5/month for monthly plan
catchpoint WebPageTest Testing parameters include TBT, TTI, and FCP 4.6 Starts at $15/month
Site24x7 Integrated monitoring tools such as Datadog, New Relic 4.6 Starts at $35/month

1. Google PageSpeed Insights

Google PageSpeed Insights

Google PageSpeed Insights is a free website speed-testing tool. It scores your test results from 1-100, anything equal to 85 and above is considered a good score, before providing you with valuable insights for improvement. As Google is the most used search engine this tool is Mecca for those who want to rank their website on Google search results.

  • It offers both desktop and mobile testing.
  • PageSpeed Insights is available in over 20 languages, increasing its user database.
  • Although there are many free website testing tools available PageSpeed Insights is considered one of the most user-friendly.
  • Completely free.

Check our guide on How to Use Google Lighthouse for Testing Website Performance.

2. Pingdom

Pingdom | best website speed test tools

Pingdom is a cloud-based application performance monitoring (APM) tool that helps you ensure that your website and applications are delivering the quality you wish to provide to your users. It provides a free website speed-testing facility that aims to deliver results that are through a quick general overview which includes total load time, number of requests, waterfall chart, and more.

  • Over 70 global testing locations to test multiple frames of reference.
  • Real-time monitoring so that you can identify and address any problem beforehand.
  • Provides alerts and notifications over e-mail or SMS when the website’s performance falls below a specified standard.

3. GTmetrix

GTmetrix

GTmetrix offers an outstanding website speed tester along with an easy-to-use interface. Once you run a test using it the results are very comprehensive backed with facts and data. Despite the quality it offers test locations are very limited (Canada (default), USA, UK, Brazil, Hong Kong, India, and Australia).

  • Results are based upon factors such as page load time, number of HTTP requests, size of the resources on the page, and number of browser renderings.
  • Provides a PageSpeed Score and a YSlow Score for your website’s performance according to the parameters of Google and Yahoo respectively.
  • Offers personalized recommendations on how can you improve your website.
  • Provides video analysis to help you understand visitors’ perspectives and make improvements accordingly.

Also Read: What to Do When Your Own Website is Flagged as Being Dangerous?

4. catchpoint WebPageTest

WebPageTest | best website speed test tools

WebPage Test is a free and open-source website speed-testing tool that delivers comprehensive results by testing your website under a variety of conditions. It is considered a trusted companion by many professional developers. It can test your website over a slow and fast network across 40 different locations.

  • Results are graded from F to A after testing it on parameters including total block time(TBT), time to interactive(TTI), first contentful paint(FCP), and many more.
  • Delivers a comparative analysis of your website and your competition which will help you in benchmarking your website and pinpoint the areas for improvement.
  • Runs the test thrice and the results displayed will help you figure out if DNS or CDN can cause a delay and if your server is responding to all the requests correctly.
  • Provides the option of using API, which can be integrated to automate website performance testing.

5. Site24x7

Site24x7

Site24x7 is a website speed testing and monitoring tool developed by ZOHO. It is considered a suitable alternative to Pingdom. It has a free plan that you can access after signup that will allow you to monitor the loading speed of 5 websites/servers across 120 locations globally.

  • Compares your website with your competition and provides you actionable insights based on data it has collected.
  • Monitors your site over time so that you can keep track of progress and locate any trends.
  • Can integrate with monitoring tools such as Datadog, New Relic, AppDynamics, etc. to give you a more comprehensive view of your website’s loading time.
  • Its basic plan starts with a $9/ mo subscription. 

6. Domsignal

Domsignal offers a set of free website testing tools that can test your website for DNS, security, performance, network, and SEO issues. Moreover, its webpage debugging tools, compilers, and generators are very helpful, especially for developers to identify and fix website security and usability issues. 

Also Read: Zyro vs Wix: Which Website Builder Should You Choose?

7. dareboost

‘DareBoost is a tool that helps businesses analyze the speed of their website. It has close to 100 different checkpoints and you can test a website for both mobile and desktop devices. It provides you with the flexibility to track many pages at once and lets you discover critical factors causing website underperformance. With free account registration allowing you to run up to 5 analyses per month.

8. Alertra

Alertra’s website monitoring service provides response times and rates to evaluate the global speed of your website. It offers outcomes from more than a dozen worldwide sites in North America, Europe, and Asia. The free test determines if your website is online and accessible to users and the Inaugural plan starts from $10/mo for monitoring 50 URLs.

9. Yellow Lab Tools

Yellow Lab Tools is a free and open-source website speed testing tool. It provides straightforward results in the form of grades and scores. That includes page weight details, request details, domain details, bottleneck analysis, CSS information, and server configuration details. It provides you the option to choose the device you want to run the test on. 

Also Read: How to Build a Website Using ChatGPT

10. sematext

Sematext is a synthetic monitoring tool known for its simplicity and reliability. It monitors API and website uptime from over 70 different locations around the world. It provides a detailed breakdown of the results along with waterfall charts to see how your website’s resources are loading. You can customize the parameters to set up different conditions for alert notifications in case of any issues. 

11. KeyCDN Website Speed Test

KeyCDN offers two website speed test tools: the Website Speed Test and the Performance Test. Website Speed Test tests and measures the performance of any HTML page and provides a breakdown of the requests, content size, and loading time. Performance Test tests the performance of any URL and provides a breakdown of the loading times and HTTP response headers.

12. new relic

New Relic provides a variety of features to trace your load time, troubleshoot issues, and identify bottlenecks. It has a free forever plan that offers you up to 100 GB of ingested data/ month. It offers you features like real-time monitoring (RUM) and synthetic monitoring that can help you identify and troubleshoot any global performing issues. It keeps a keen eye on performance trends to see how your website has been responding. 

Also Read: 27 Best Free Website Hosting Services

13. DATADOG

Datadog has monitoring nodes all over the world. It provides an all-inclusive website speed test with real-time monitoring alerts. So you can be alerted when your website is not performing up to the benchmark. This will help the DevOps team to identify and counter any forthcoming issues before the impact is large. It stores historical data and analyses the trends and patterns

14. YSlow

If you are someone who is looking to rank your website according to the rules set by Yahoo!, YSlow is the best tool for you. You can use its free services by downloading its extension on Chrome, Firefox, Opera, PhantomJS, and Safari. Along with suggestions to improve your website speed it will also provide tools for performance analysis such as Smush.it and JSLint.

15. Uptrends

Uptrends is a comprehensive tool to test and check website speed. One major benefit of using Uptrends (paid) is that it will give you access to real-time monitoring from 233 website testing checkpoints across the globe. It can help you integrate various tools and services so you can integrate website speed testing in your workflow. It provides a dedicated mobile and desktop version of the software.

16. Dotcom-Monitor

Dotcom-Monitor offers you more than 30 testing locations around the world, so you can run tests for website speed from multiple geographical locations and collect more precise data on the performance of your website. It supports real-user monitoring (RUM) so that it can analyze and present data based on real subjects visiting websites which gives it an edge over synthetic monitoring. It can also offer API integration so that testing and data collecting can be automated.

Also Read: 80 Best Websites for Boredom

How to Use Website Speed Test Tools?

While there is a plethora of tools available in the market each with its strengths and weaknesses, here are a few points to consider when using one to test your website:

  • Website speed can vary depending on the user’s location to get a complete overview of your website’s speed test use multiple locations from around the world.
  • Thoroughly test all the pages on your website to make sure they all function as per your requirements.
  • To get accurate results test your website from a variety of devices and browsers.
  • Use monitoring features to always keep track of your results over time. This will help you keep up with the dynamic environment of the competition.

We hope our blog helped find some of the best website speed test tools according to your needs and preferences. If you have nay queries or suggestions for us, do let us know in the comments section. Stay tuned to TechCult for more informative blogs.

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