One of the most important characteristics users and search engines note about any website is its speed. Recent reviews show that almost fifty percent of the internet users expect a website to load within two seconds and are likely to abandon the pursuit if it takes too long to load. Also, more than eighty percent of the users who had a bad experience with the performance of a website aren’t likely to return to that website. Despite its importance, digital marketers tend to focus more on the online marketing aspects and overlook the enormous potential and importance of improving their website loading speed. There are lots of tools that can test your website’s speed and performance. We will now discuss the benefits of some of the most popular and free online tools.
GTmetrix is one of the free online tools which can help you develop a faster, more efficient, and all-around improved website experience for your users. This tool comes with a suite of features and options to optimize your website speed. It passes your URL through an actual android device to get real world performance data on your page load. You can record the page load and identify where the roadblocks occur. Its monitored alerts feature enables you to save a video of the page load which triggered the alert. You can also set numerous conditions based on page size, speed and load time to get a notification whenever your falls below the condition set. It is also enabled with an easy to use application programming interface (API) to integrate with other websites and much more.
Page Speed Insights provided by Google is another tool which measures the performance of a page for mobile devices and desktop devices. It fetches the uniform resource locator (URL) twice, once from the desktop-user and once from the mobile-user agent. It provides you with a score based on the performance of your page and a score of eighty-five and above indicates that your page is doing well. It also provides insights on how to improve the performance of the page. However, since the performance of a network connection varies considerably, this tool only considers the network-independent aspects of page performance. The absolute performance of the page will still be dependent on a user’s network connection.
Pingdom is another great tool which enables you to test the efficiency of your website. It examines all the aspects of your web page, provides you with relevant statistics for measuring performance, saves each test automatically so that you can review it as and when required and also enables you to test your website from multiple locations. Web designers and developers are now able to analyze the performance of their apps and websites much better than before. It also facilitates business owners to collect data about the loading of their page and present it to the designers for suggestions on improvement.
Load Impact is a testing service provider with more than a decade of experience in this field. Load testing makes it possible to see the performance impact on a website, app or API as the number of users and their geographic locations are increased. They are capable of simulating real, external traffic to your site over the internet. For example, it can simulate how your website will respond if a hundred people simultaneously load your website. This tool is unique because everything is run on its servers. This means that the user will not have to install, operate or configure the testing infrastructure. It is a cloud-based performance testing service established for continuous delivery software development.
The OctaGate Site Timer is an extraordinary tool for troubleshooting slow loading web pages. It times the entire download of every element on a webpage. It has a web monitor that tracks how long it takes for a given web page to load and a site timer that provides you with the statistics on how long each item takes to load and how much data it contains. However, it provides you with the website loading time measurements of users based in Europe only and not across multiple locations. From the above discussion we can deduce that one needs to not only focus on the aesthetics but also on the performance of the website.
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