Do you want to run a website speed test? Most beginners don’t know where to begin and what to look for in their website speed test.
There are a ton of online website speed test tools that you can use. However, all of them present results in a way that it becomes confusing for non-tech savvy users.
In this article, we’ll show you how to properly run a website speed test and the best tools to run your speed tests.
Best Tools to Run a Website Speed Test
There are a lot of free and paid website speed test and performance monitoring tools that you can use. Each one of them has some really cool features that distinguish them.
You don’t need to just test your website with one tool. You can use multiple tools and run multiple tests to be sure of the results.
Trying to achieve a perfect grade or score on these tools is often extremely difficult and quite impossible in most cases for real-world functioning websites.
Your goal should be to improve your page load speed for your users, so they can enjoy a faster and consistent user experience on your website, as well as helping you rank higher on search results.
Google Pagespeed Insights
Google Pagespeed Insights is a website performance monitoring tool created by Google. It gives you website performance reports for both mobile and desktop views. You can switch between these reports and find some issues that are common among both reports and some that Google recommends being fixed in the mobile view.
You also get detailed recommendations for each issue, which is helpful for developers. However, the tool itself is a bit intimidating for beginners and non-developer users.
GTmetrix
GTmetrix is another powerful website speed testing tool. It allows you to test your website using popular tools like pagespeed. You can change geographic location and browser by creating a free account.
It shows detailed reports with a brief summary of the results. You can switch between the two tools and view recommendations. Clicking on each recommendation will provide you with more details.
How to Properly Run a Website Speed Test
Running website speed tests is not guaranteed to tell you exactly how your website performs.
It is important to run these tests thoroughly before you start analyzing the data.
1. Run Multiple Tests
There are multiple factors that can affect your test. Even though most website speed test tools run over the cloud at the fastest internet speeds, each test would show you slightly different results.
The most important difference you will notice is the time it took to download the complete webpage. We recommend running at least 3 tests to get a more accurate picture.
2. Check the Performance of Your Website Firewall / CDN Service
While WordPress caching plugins can do a lot, however, they definitely have their limitations. They do nothing against spambots which means your server resources get wasted a lot.
This is where you need Sucuri. It is the best WordPress firewall plugin that improves your server performance by blocking malicious requests.
A CDN service allows you to serve static website files like images, stylesheets, and scripts through a network of servers spread around the globe. This reduces the server load on your website, makes it load faster, and improves user experience for all your users.
Turning on your CDN service and the firewall will improve your test results significantly.
3. Test from Different Geographic Locations
The test results will show you a different user experience than what your actual users are feeling when they visit your website.
This is why you need to use Google Analytics to see where your users are coming from. After that, use that information to select a geographic region for your tests.
For example, if you learned that most of your website users are coming from Europe, then choosing a test server in Germany will give you the closest results.
If your website visitors are from all over the world, then you can run multiple tests to find out how your website performance varies for different regions.
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