A website speed test gives you a measurable snapshot of how fast your site is loading. You can also track changes and improvements over time.
Website speed is important because it can affect how potential customers perceive your company. If a site takes excessive time to load, users may get frustrated and leave before they can even begin browsing the product or service offerings you have to offer.
A website performance test measures more than just load times. You can use free website speed test tools to check for errors and other technical issues that might affect your site's performance. The tests can help you to remedy these problems before they cause any harm to your business' reputation or bottom line.
Basic Concepts to Get Started
Website speed is a measurement of how quickly a website loads. The concept is pretty straightforward: the better a website loads, the faster your users can access and take advantage of its content or services. Speed also plays an important role in search engine ranking. Keep your site's loading time as low as possible if you want to rank high on Google results pages (SERPs).
A lot of factors affect how quickly your site will load. Several online tools can help you diagnose these issues when they arise so that they don't become major problems for users down the line!
Load times
The load times of a webpage are the amount of time it takes for a page to load completely. This includes all images and content. A website's load time can be measured in milliseconds and is often determined by the number of resources on a site, such as videos or images.
Load times are important because they can affect your business's bottom line and user experience. If your site takes too long to load, users might get frustrated and leave without visiting any pages—or worse, they may not even bother visiting!
HTTP requests
The number of HTTP requests is an important factor in website speed. The more HTTP requests, the slower your website. This is because each request has to go through a lot of back-and-forth communication with your server before it can complete its task and send back data to you.
The good news is that there are ways to reduce this number—by using CDNs (content delivery networks), for example, or minifying scripts and CSS code and combining JavaScript files into one script file. You can also optimize images so that they load quickly on all devices without compromising quality too much.
Time to first byte (TTFB)
TTFB is the time it takes to get the first byte of data from your server. If you're wondering why that matters, it's because it's a measure of how fast your server can respond to a web request, and it's also a good indicator of how fast your content is being delivered.
For example, if you wrote something on your website and hit publish, not realizing an error in your code, users would see the text but no pictures or videos. They'd have to wait until TTFB is completed before seeing anything—but then they'd have to wait even longer for those images or videos to load since they're more resource intensive (and therefore take longer).
Top Free Website Speed Test Tools
Google Page Speed Insights
This is a free tool that you can use to test your website's speed, errors, and suggestions for improvement. Google page speed insights is a web-based tool that helps you make your website faster. It gives you recommendations for improving your site's performance, and it provides you with a score based on Google's own PageSpeed Insights test.
· A recommendation is an actionable step you can take to improve the performance of your website's pages.
· You can also see which resources affect page load time (the time it takes for a visitor to view all elements on a page), including third-party libraries, tracking scripts, and ads.
Gtmetrix
Gtmetrix offers a lot of information about each test, which you can scroll through by clicking the "Results" tab on the top of their page. They also provide helpful tips for optimizing your site, broken down into categories like Performance, Structure, Waterfall, Video, and History. Gtmetrix can be used for mobile and desktop devices and web browsers like Chrome and Firefox.
Pingdom speed test
Pingdom Speed Test is a simple tool that allows you to test the load time of your website, broken down by different elements of your site. It also gives you an overall grade showing how optimized your site is and tips on improving it. The results are clear and easy to interpret, making this one of our favorite tools for beginners and experts alike.
Pingdom also has a Premium version that offers more in-depth analysis options (like page size optimization), but if all you want is a free speed checker for now, then this one is for you!
How to Properly Run a Website Speed Test
You should keep a few things in mind when running a website speed test.
Run the test on a desktop, not a mobile device. If you are testing your site on an iPhone or Android phone, the connection is likely slower than you usually experience on your desktop computer at home or work. That's because wireless networks typically have more congestion than wired ones.
Run the test on a wired connection for better accuracy. Wireless connections can be slower and less reliable than hardwired ones, so make sure you're using an Ethernet cable if possible if you want to get accurate results from any of these tests.
Clean up old history and cookies before running tests—or else they could skew results! Make sure all browser tabs are closed and all applications are closed before running any website speed tests; otherwise, their results might include data related to slowdowns caused by other programs running simultaneously inside them (like Adobe Reader).
Conclusion
We've covered the most important factors that affect website speed. We also looked at some of the best free tools for testing your website speed and performance and how to use them properly. It's important to note that even if you have a fast connection or a super-powerful server, it won't matter much if your website is not optimized for performance. But with these easy steps, anyone can do it!