19 Oct, 2022 | Responsive Web Design Services

Website Speed Testing - Importance, Types, and Tools

We all have used websites at least once in our lifetime, and we know how impatient we are when it comes to the loading speed of a website. Thus, the performance and ability of your website to load quickly are essential for its usability and success. Just understand it by taking your example. Have you ever visited a website and waited for a long time for it to load? You felt frustrated, right? The same thing happens when visitors come to your website, and it takes longer than usual; they will probably feel frustrated and return back searching for your competitor's website. Loading speed not only affects user experience but directly impacts your website's SEO. So, whether you are a jewelry merchant, a school, or a college, or in any other industry, your website should be optimized for search engines. Therefore, Website Speed and Performance are crucial.

What is the Importance of Website Speed?

Speed can either make your website or break it. This is the reason why website developers, marketers, analysts, and IT departments are more focused on website speed testing tools. Improving your website speed and performance metrics can significantly impact your overall website performance, thereby helping you achieve your success goals. Page speed impacts your website in almost every area, from user experience to search engine optimization. We have seen that most of the website users will not wait for more than 4 seconds on a web page to load before moving on to some other store. And this is a fact that faster loading websites will perform better in the market. But how to determine the speed of your website? Just sitting in front of your computer, looking for your website to load in order to determine the speed. Is it the solution? Absolutely Not. That is why most of the developers and testers will take advantage of the wide range of performance testing tools for thoroughly testing scenarios. Before knowing various tools for speed testing your website, you should know that there are many other kinds of performance tests that need to be performed on a website. Read further to learn more about types of website performance tests.

Types of Website Performance Tests

Performance tests are the non-functional tests done to check the responsiveness, scalability, and throughput of the website under test. This mainly helps in increased revenue generation and enhanced user experience. Below is the wide range of performance tests that can be done on your website.

Performance Test: Performance testing means checking the website's scalability, responsive website design, and speed.
Load Test: This test is done to check and verify how the website performs under load.
Stress Test: This helps the tester note how the system works under extreme load conditions. Stress tests help identify the issues related to synchronization, memory leaks, etc.
Capacity Test: This is to identify how many users/transactions a website can handle at a particular time.
This test is done to ensure whether the system will be able to take an expected load for a more extended period.

How to Perform Web App Performance Testing?

Before you start testing your website or web application performance, you should keep a few things in your mind. Following are the considerations:

Understand the website's purpose, identify whether it contains any payment gateways, web services, or anything related.
You should always know the reason behind testing the website. Always understand the things to be measured, such as speed, number of customers, volume, response time, etc.
Know the expectations of your customers.
Project schedule and the QA Window
Availability of resources and QA tools

Steps to Perform Website Testing

Setup the Physical Test environment like hardware, software, tools required for testing your website.
Design Test plans according to the criteria, ensure covering all possible testing scenarios
Now, test the website for one user to ensure that the setup is correct
Imitate the workload as per the plan. Then execute the test with different workloads. Now monitor the tests for Resource utilization.
Now that you are done with testing, analyze the results, and identify the areas having bugs and errors.
The issues should be reported with as much detail as possible. There are many website testing tools that also provide the remedy for the bugs.

This was all about website testing, its importance, and the steps to test the website or a web app. Now that we know how important it is to test the website before launch, there are many tools that would help you test your website and get it ready for launch. Read further to gain some knowledge about Website Speed and Performance Testing Tools.

Free Website Speed and Performance Testing Tools

Now that you have a lot of understanding about website testing, check out these tools for testing your website's speed. Each tool offers its unique features, reporting, and different ways to show results. It is essential to know that the DNS lookup will be slower when you are running these tools for the first time. Therefore, it is recommended to run the tests multiple times and take an average of the overall results.

Pingdom

Pingdom is a well-known website speed testing tool. The test results in Pingdom are usually divided into four sections: waterfall breakdown, performance grade, history, and page analysis. The page analysis features a website overview with additional information like size analysis, size per domain, requests per domain, and what type of content had more requests. Pingdom's speed test tool enables you to test your website from around 70 different locations. The results are provided with the speed insights that tell you where you need improvements. The result is broken down into four sections: Page size by domain, page size by content type, requests by domain, and requests by content type.

Site 24x7

Your page speed is often determined by the amount of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript you have implemented on the front-end. In other cases, your host or the server environment can directly impact your page speed. The site 24x7 page is specially designed to evaluate server environment performance. It integrates with other system administrator tools and provides a readable waterfall graph that displays what and when loading every page. Its integration with system administration tools can make it a great addition to the list of top website speed testing tools.

Dotcom-Monitor

Dotcom-Monitor offers you 25 different locations and 7 different browsers, including blackberry. Once you run the test on the dotcom monitor, you will get the results based on the load time and get details on your server response. With this tool, you will also be able to check how your website looks to the people visiting for the second time and have cached resources on their system. It helps you see how your load time varies as per the location and what difference users are experiencing on your website worldwide. It is a perfect tool if you want to know how people experience your website from different geographical regions of the world.

Google PageSpeed Insights

Google PageSpeed Insights is a website page speed testing tool that grades your website from 1-100. The more grade it gives you, the more optimized your website is. If, after testing, you get a grade of more than 85, that means your website is performing well. In addition, it gives you reports for both mobile and desktop versions of your website. You can view suggestions for improvements, such as the need to minify your CSS, optimize your images, or any other enhancements required. In addition, the mobile version report includes an extra section known as "User experience" that is involved in the scoring of your website.

GTmetrix

GTmetrix goes into detail, assigning your website a grade from F to A. Its report is divided into five sections. It includes metrics from Google Lighthouse Tool, video, history, and waterfall breakdown. By doing a free registration, you can test your website from different locations. You can test your website across various browsers, connection types to see how it impacts your website. GTmetrix replaced YSlow and PageSpeed metrics in 2020 with tabular data from Google Lighthouse. Lighthouse is the golden standard for modern website performance improvements. You only need to create a google account, and most of the features are free to use.

Uptrends

Uptrends offer 226 different locations to choose from when you are executing your speed test. You can even choose to test it with a desktop or a mobile device. You can select the different screen sizes and whether or not to throttle the virtual connection speed. Uptrends used to be a very basic tool, but they have upgraded their services with time. Uptrends' website testing report is broken down into two sections: waterfall graph and domain groups. The domain group comes with a different perspective, i.e., it categorizes the resources into other sources.

WebPage Test

WebPage Test is an open-source tool for website performance testing. It allows you to test your website across 40 different locations and a vivid range of devices. Additionally, the tests can also be executed over both slow and fast 4G mobile networks. The test reports will include a grade from F to A. It will also include additional information like compression information, caching, TTFB, waterfall charts for the load speed, etc. It also has a unique feature where the test is executed 3 times, and data sets of all the 3 times are displayed. This will help you identify whether the DNS or CDN is causing any delay.

DareBoost

DareBoost is a performance testing tool that gives a detailed analysis across multiple locations around the world for both mobile and desktop versions. It has a simple dashboard yet shows various information like the moment it starts testing the page to the end and gives tips on how you can improve to get it search engine friendly. The above-mentioned were some of the top Website Speed and Performance testing tools that will help you to test your website and optimize it according to the search engines. But, don't you think this is kind of manual work for you to do. Since the industry is rapidly growing, testing has also been automated. What is meant by an Automated test?

What is meant by Automated Website Testing?

Automated Website Testing is meant by the process of automating the user scenarios on a website to test its behavior on multiple aspects. The QAs make these user scenarios with an automation framework such as Selenium to mimic user interaction on the UI of a website. A website undergoes various modifications during the entire development lifecycle. After each change, a website needs to be tested across numerous hardware configurations and different OS. Performing such complicated tests manually can be time-consuming and very expensive. Therefore, Automation is essential for testing your website.

Improve Your Speed, Attract Audience, and Win the Race

The tools above-mentioned can be very helpful for you to travel on the pathway of improved website performance. However, each of the tools mentioned above has its unique features, and it is up to you to test these tools and figure out which one works best for your requirements. We think that speed testing is something that should be done right after you have finished developing the website. Testing the website makes it more responsive, scalable, and optimized to search engines. Over time, things are going to change, and if you use these tools, you will be a step ahead of your peers. Hiring a Website Speed Testing Company will help you tackle different challenges, improve website performance, and deliver the best user experience to the customers. WeDoWebApps LLC can efficiently help you with that journey. Not only testing, even if you are looking for full-cycle website development and testing services, WeDoWebApps LLC can help you with your requirements. We offer the leading responsive website design services across the globe. Feel free to contact us anytime you have a query related to our services.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is website speed testing?

Website speed testing refers to the process of measuring how fast a website loads and performs various functions, such as page rendering, script execution, and resource loading.

Why is website speed testing important?

Website speed is a critical factor that affects user experience, search engine rankings, and overall business success. Faster websites tend to have lower bounce rates, higher engagement, and better conversion rates.

What are the different types of website speed testing?

There are several types of website speed testing, including:

Page speed testing: measures the time it takes for a webpage to fully load and display all its elements
Server speed testing: measures the response time of the web server to requests
Connection speed testing: measures the bandwidth and latency of the user's internet connection
Synthetic testing: simulates user interactions with the website to test performance under different scenarios
Real user monitoring: tracks actual user interactions and measures website speed and performance based on user data.

What are some popular website speed testing tools?

There are many website speed testing tools available, both free and paid. Some popular ones include:

Google PageSpeed Insights
GTmetrix
Pingdom Website Speed Test
WebPageTest
YSlow
Lighthouse
DareBoost.

How can I improve my website's speed?

There are many ways to improve website speed, such as optimizing images and videos, minimizing HTTP requests, reducing server response time, using a content delivery network (CDN), and caching content. Website speed testing tools can help identify specific areas that need improvement.

Written by Mike

Mike is a Graphic Designer at WEDOWEBAPPS LLC. Having demonstrated experience in UI/UX graphic designs, his work is well appreciated by clients. He enjoys exploring different design trends and designing research for different projects.