Website Speed Testing

Website speed testing. Amazon increased their overall sales rate by 1% as a direct result of increasing their website speed by 100 milliseconds. This equals over £1 billion in revenue. According to many recent research studies, 250 milliseconds is what keeps your targeted customers from choosing your competitor over you. Simply put, having a slow website is simply not an option in business today.

Many tools on the web help you perform a website speed test and compare your page load time with that of your competitors. The test results help you in narrowing down the list of problems which are causing delays. Whether these are too many HTTP requests, slow caching, image formats, hosting service, junk lines in your code, DNS name resolving, the list goes on and on. You can also run a website speed test from multiple locations around the globe. In this way, you gain a better insight into your business, as well as different markets in the region, and can plan the strategy for improvements.

For further reading on the subject, have a peek at Google’s best practices for website speed and performance:

https://developers.google.com/speed/docs/best-practices/rules_intro

We also have a handy guide on how to speed up your website here.

Here is a list of helpful free tools that will run website tests for you:

  • Pingdom Tools is a global network of servers that monitor your site throughout the whole year. Implements an alert system.
  • Page Speed Online analyzes your website’s performance under Google’s Web Performance Best Practices.
  • YSlow is a Yahoo’s tool available as a plug-in for Firefox and Chrome. It provides a detailed report card and adds a grade (A, B,…F) according to your overall performance score.
  • WebPageTest tool allows you to run a free website speed test from multiple locations around the globe using real browsers (Firefox, Chrome, IE) and from different geographical regions.
  • Load Impact runs on cloud servers and gives you an all-time access to your test configurations and test results. Involves a premium account for more than 50 simulated users.
  • Octa Gate offers a bird’s view insight into the site load time for each of your pages and presses this information in a grid.