20 Free Online Tools for Website Speed Testing
We all should be aware by now that Internet users are impatient when it comes to waiting for a web page to load. Thus, your website’s performance and ability to render speedily is critical to its usability and, ultimately, its success.
In order to help you build faster websites and identify troublesome website performance bottlenecks, consider incorporating some of the following tools into your web development process.
Tip: It might be a good idea to use several of these website speed-testing tools so that you can obtain a better picture of site speed issues. Heck, they’re free, so why not?
1. Page Speed Online
Google’s Page Speed Online — which is a web-based adaptation of the popular Google Chrome web development browser extension, Page Speed — analyzes your website’s performance under Google’s Web Performance Best Practices (a set of rules for optimal front-end performance). You can gain lots of information from this handy web tool – it even includes a report for mobile device best practices for optimal performance.
2. Pingdom Tools
This free online website speed-testing tool by Pingdom (a server, network and website monitoring service) provides you with several reports such as a breakdown of how long each web page object (e.g. images, style sheets and JavaScript libraries) takes to download and performance grades for things like browser caching. Another useful report is a page analysis that provides information on load time, page size and requests.
3. Free Website Performance Test (BrowserMob)
This free website speed and performance testing tool by BrowserMob, a company that offers website load testing and monitoring service, gives you a ton of information about your web page speed such as average load time, total page weight and number of page objects. It pings your web page from four locations so that you can get a global view of your website’s performance.
4. Which loads faster?
This interesting tool pits two websites against each other in terms of loading time; for example, you can find out if Google loads faster than Bing does by using this tool. This can be a simple tool for comparing whether your website performs better or worse than competing sites. This open source tool (view the source on GitHub) was originally created to promote the importance of web performance.
5. WebPagetest
This nifty online tool tests your web page’s rendering speed in real browsers (Chrome, Firefox and IE) and gives you a choice of conducting the test from several locations around the world. It also has advanced settings with options for simulating common Internet connection speeds (e.g. DSL and 56K dial up) and ad-blocking so you can see the performance cost of running ads on your site.
6. Web Page Analyzer
This simple web page speed test analyzer — probably one of the oldest tools out there with its first version released in 2003 — gives you data on your web page’s size, assets and load time. It also supplies you with recommendations on things you can make better.
7. Show Slow
This is the web-based version of the open source server application by the same name (Show Slow). Show Slow allows you to add a URL to be monitored (publicly) and regularly captures results from three popular testing tools: YSlow, Page Speed and dynaTrace. This tool requires registration.
8. Site-Perf
This web-based website speed testing tool displays relevant data on page-rendering time, such as total download time, number of connections made and number of requests made. It also has some bonus features such as being able to run the test even if the web page has HTTP authentication (simply supply it with the password to the page) and the ability to simulate different types of Internet connections.
9. Load Impact
Load Impact’s free online load testing and performance tool gives you plenty of data on your website’s ability to handle website traffic. This online web performance evaluation tool has the ability to show graphed data such as user load time (simulated by an automated virtual machine) and requests per second (helpful for seeing how durable your web server is and how fast it can handle web page requests).
10. OctaGate SiteTimer
OctaGate SiteTimer is a rather straightforward online tool: you plug in the URL you want to test and, in turn, it will output a bar graph featuring all web page objects containing information such as download start times, end times and duration for each. This tool is beneficial for quickly discovering slow-loading page objects so that you can optimize them to improve website speed.
Other Website Speed Testing Tools to Check Out
- Web Site Performance Test (Gomez) – a real-time site performance tool displaying information on things such as DNS lookup time and connection time.
- Webslug – similar to the Which loads faster? tool mentioned above, this web tool will compare the site performance of two websites.
- WebWait – a basic website speed timer with options for specifying the number of requests to make and the interval between requests (e.g. 5 requests in 10 seconds).
- Website Speed Test (Searchmetrics) – provides plenty of data on page speed, including estimated load times for various types of Internet connections.
- GTmetrix – an online tool that uses YSlow and PageSpeed to evaluate your website’s front-end performance, giving you easy-to-understand information.
- Website Speed Test (WebToolHub) – a rather basic online tool that provides data such as page size, load time, download speed and average speed in tabular format.
- Yottaa Site Speed Optimizer – this web performance analyzer outputs great-looking reports. This tool requires you to sign up.
- Zoompf Free Web Performance Scan – this tool will scan a web page and gather data pertaining to web performance. You are required to provide and verify your email address in order to run tests.
- Site speed checker – a web-based site speed tool that allows you to run tests on 10 URLs all at once.
- Free web site speed test (Self SEO) – this simple website speed testing tool gives you the option to enter up to 10 URLs to run tests on simultaneously.
Related Content
- 10 Ways to Improve Your Web Page Performance
- Performance Comparison of Major Web Browsers
- 10 Free Server & Network Monitoring Tools that Kick Ass
- Related categories: Tools and Web Development
42 Comments
Michael
November 10th, 2011
As always: THANKS for a very, very useful article.
Many of the mentioned are new to me.
//Michael.
Nora Reed
November 10th, 2011
This such a nice collection, i found some more tools which i have no idea about them! that will gonna very useful to me! thanks :)
Jaffery
November 10th, 2011
Very handy and useful resource list… helped my junior developer team a lot recently. Good idea to post it ;)
Ben Norman
November 10th, 2011
Great resources, will have to try out some of these.
Matt Zimmermann
November 10th, 2011
Nice list. I really like using WebPagetest, seems to have a lot of good information.
Cristi
November 10th, 2011
Number five and number six is what i used until now. I’m really satisfied with WebPageTest.
I’ll check Page Speed online which sounds good.
Stan
November 10th, 2011
Or simply bookmark http://www.dotcom-monitor.com >Tools and use the 14 website speed performance tools all in one place
Mr.Ahmed Hussein
November 10th, 2011
Thank you, Jacob Gube :)
ArleyM
November 10th, 2011
Awesome list!
kowsik
November 11th, 2011
Please add http://blitz.io to your list! We make load and performance testing a fun sport with a free 250 concurrent user plan.
Thanks,
@pcapr
Sankar Datti
November 11th, 2011
I know only 3 tools over here. It seems, so many are available in the web. Good Collection. Thanks Jacob.
blueshark web design
November 11th, 2011
I would also recommend smush.it from Yahoo to help compress your images.
Reece Cropley
November 11th, 2011
Great Article. Even though broadband speeds are ever increasing, users arent waiting longer than a few seconds before going eleswhere.
I wrote this article about set cache expiry dates on the different mime tags to speed up your site. http://reececropley.com/blog/2011/10/11/speed-up-your-website-with-cache-expiry-dates/
Peter Cranstone
November 11th, 2011
There’s one more. We have an Android browser than can measure real time HTTP traffic inside the browser. It also integrates carrier networks and geo-location into the results. More at 3pmobile.com
Cheers,
Peter
Swamykant
November 11th, 2011
I love pingdom tools and it has added many features recently. I tried few of these apps.
Thanks for share.
Nick Yeoman
November 11th, 2011
What about the best one? (blame stella)
Carell Steve
November 11th, 2011
amazing, thanks for sharing.
Brett Cairns
November 11th, 2011
Excellent article. Was not aware that there are so many options to evaluate page speed. I currently use firebug and it seems to work well
Jacob Gube
November 12th, 2011
Thanks for the additional links, I’m sure future readers will appreciate this!
Please do feel free to share your own favorite web-based, free speed testing tool here in the comments.
@Nick Yeoman: Thanks for the suggestion. Here is the link to the site Nick was referring to: Stella
Michael Cobases
November 12th, 2011
I am mostly using Pingdom, but looks like Google offers competitive tool as well.
But for me as a guy who doesn’t know much about coding I use cloduflare to speed up most of my websites. You can suck at coding part but this service brings your site back to life.
Jenni
November 12th, 2011
Thanks for this useful info!
Piwik
November 12th, 2011
Great resources, thank you very much.
Andre
November 12th, 2011
Nice roundup,quite a few that I did not know yet.
I tried Pingdom once but didn’t find it very useful since (if I remember correctly) it downloads *every* background image in your .css files, even the ones that are not used.
An interesting site to add to your list would be http://loads.in which shows you how long your site takes to load from various places around the world, using different browsers
Ross Macks
November 12th, 2011
Cheers, Thanks for sharing.
Henry Louis
November 13th, 2011
Oh..! I like this post very much. These are really very helpful tools for website speed testing. Thanks for sharing this post.
AK
November 14th, 2011
Thanks for this nice collection. Got some new bookmarks.. ;)
SmashinGeeks
November 14th, 2011
Google Page Speed is the best to know your blog’s page speed.Thanks for sharing rest of these.
Sergey Chernyshev
November 14th, 2011
Thanks for mentioning ShowSlow, I’m glad you liked it!
ShowSlow actually integrates with Google Page Speed (online and Firefox extension) as well as WebPageTest (of the ones listed) and can track metrics from those over time.
Adrianne
November 15th, 2011
I myself is a web developer and i know that that speed of the websites matter a lot. I was aware of the some of the tools you have mentioned above.
Morgan & Me Creative
November 15th, 2011
Thanks again for sharing such great finds on website speed checking. We normally use no 6. Didn’t know there were so many around either.
benjion
November 15th, 2011
great! i share this post !
Mohit
November 15th, 2011
Great post! Nice resources. Thanks for sharing this with all of us.
l
November 16th, 2011
this article is good
Rajesh Namase
November 16th, 2011
I like Google Page Speed Tools, I improved my site performance by using Google Page Speed Tools. I’ll try other tools for better results. Thanks for posting such a nice tools.
l
November 16th, 2011
very informative
Elettronico
November 25th, 2011
Hello,
thank you for the list. Useful resources to try. I used Web Page Analyzer, the old school works…. fine!
Blindmono
November 25th, 2011
Nice collection!
You forgot WooRank: http://www.woorank.com
:)
webdevelopergeeks
November 26th, 2011
Ya i knew one or two out of your list. But great collection overall and quite useful too. I personally like google page speed.
Devin Walker
November 28th, 2011
Very useful for me to know what other tools are out there. I like webpagetest but am checking out some others.
Speedmaster
November 28th, 2011
GREAT list, thanks!!!
Malcolm
August 30th, 2012
Excellent List. It’s good having a few different sites because it give you a bit of range.
tarekitsme
October 8th, 2012
amazing list ,,thanks a lot for sharing :)
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