Best ways to test the performance of a website
In this article I’ll show you the best ways to test the performance of a website, amazing and free resources that will give you ideas on how you can improve
A big concern of everyone who has a website is the response time or performance of the website.
How long does it take to respond? TTFB (Time To First Bite)? Are the images optimized? Do you have JavaScript blocking loading?
All these are interesting matters when we want to do quality work
Also, if you don’t know, all these points directly affect SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
SEO is a ‘secret’ metric responsible for leveraging your site in Google’s search results, that is, getting you on the first line for pages
So we can realize that the more performing the site is, the better it ranks on Google and the more organic visits it will have
How to test the performance of a website
Given the introduction of the importance of having a website with quick responses, optimized images and code
Let’s now see ways on how to test the performance of a website
And the good news is that all these features are common sites, which makes testing much easier as the process is not complicated, we don’t need to install anything or enter code, just have our site URL
We have 3 big tools, at least in 2019-20 they are the most used
1 – Page Speed Insights
You can access the site by clicking here!
Page Speed Insights is from Google, that is, following its recommendations means that you will have a better SEO
Also, as in recent times we have an overwhelming majority of people accessing websites through mobiles
It has a higher focus on mobile devices; see that the first tab of the photo I shared here is a Mobile one.
In addition, the page presents metrics such as time of first content displayed, time to activate and speed index
There is a diagnostics section where Google makes suggestions for improvement, so your score will be better under this metric
2 – GTmetrix
You can access the site by clicking here!
In GTmetrix, we have some different metrics
The Focus is on total loading time, page size and number of requests
And the suggestions that GTmetrix makes are based on a grade (table) from 0 to 100
It has several topics like: minify HTML, minify CSS, image optimization
And if you click on each of these items, you have a detailed analysis of what could be improved
I particularly think this service is the best, as the tips are well directed on what needs to be done, without beating around the bush
Also, note that these ways to test the performance of a website are very similar but the diversity of details of each one can help you improve your website in all possible aspects.
3 – Pingdom
You can access the site by clicking here!
Pingdom is excellent and it has a GTmetrix footprint that presents the information in close detail
And it also makes a division of the impacts of each aspect, for example: size of HTML, CSS, Image, etc…
Based on this report you can separately analyze the points that are slowing down your site
Conclusion
In this article I presented three ways to test the performance of a site I use and which I like the most.
The level of detail is very high and there are both simple and complex points to improve
So there’s no excuse not to improve your site’s performance and consequently your website’s SEO
And that’s it for today, See you on the next post!
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