This tutorial will run through how to check your website page using free publicly available tools online. By using these resources, you'll be able to check if your website page speed score is good or bad and what you can do to improve these scores.
There are primarily three free website page speed checker tools that own a large chunk of market share.
We'll go through each of these and discuss the advantages and disadvantages as well as what to look out for when running your website through these tools.
Google Page Speed Insights
Although Google may on the face of it seem to dominate, their Page Speed Insights tool doesn't actually give you any data in regards to how long the actual page takes to render.
On the other hand, the tool does provide a lot of useful insights as to how you can attain a Pass by offering suggestions such as deferring JavaScript, adding critical inline CSS and caching resources.
Pingdom
Pingdom appears the be the most user friendly page speed tool going due to it's simplistic and intuitive interface. You don't need to sign up for an account, all you need to do is navigate to their website:
Then you need to select one of the location options to identify where you want the tool to test the location of fetching the website and enter.
Pingdom also offers some amazing up-time monitoring tools for a fee which will notify you when your website is down.
GT Metrix
GT Metrix has gained a fantastic reputation for itself when identify page speed issues as the data presented back to the user can be seen in different tabs as well as different mediums.
On the default tab, GT Metrix presents grades for a variety of different metrics. However further tabs are available to provide further insight. Their Y Slow tab presents the data in a waterfall format, to assist with the user interface and allowing users to understand:
- What resources are being used on your website
- What order each resources are loading
- How long each specific resource takes to fetch, wait and render the request
