Three Online Tools to Check Your Website Speed and Performance

The new year is a good time to review your website and find out what is affecting site speed and performance.

Fast websites mean happier web visitors, who want to engage with your content and learn what services/products you offer.

Many factors that affect website performance are dependent on your web hosting provider and their setup, which you have limited options for changing, unless you move to a new hosting provider.

But there are still items you have control over and can modify to improve the speed of your website, including image optimization, minifying resources, and enabling compression.

Once you’ve taken the steps on your site to improve website performance, the next step is to check the results of your efforts to confirm your optimizations produced a good outcome.

Or find out if you have more work to do.

Where do you start checking website performance?

Here are three free online tools I recommend for analyzing your site. Each tool provides suggestions for improving speed and performance.

1. PageSpeed Tools
   
   Created by Google Developers, PageSpeed Tools offers a set of tools to help you analyze and optimize your site for desktop and mobile.

   With Page Speed Insights, you can get your PageSpeed score and suggestions on how to make your site faster. The performance score summarizes the page performance; a score of 90 or higher is considered good.

2. PingdomA free tool for web professionals, Pingdom provides a performance overview of a page on your site, including a performance grade, load time, page performance tips, requests, content size by type and domain, and response codes.

   Additionally, Pingdom offers a premium service to monitor and test the performance of your site.

3. GTmetrix
   

   Learn how your site performs and what might be slowing it down with GTMetrix, which provides a summary of key performance indicators and milestones with their report page highlighting site grade and web vitals.

   You can test your site from multiple locations around the world.

What tools do you use to check performance and speed on your website?