This article presents why the performance of your website must be flawless and what tools can help you optimize loading time.

For your visitors, nothing more annoying than a website that takes forever to load. Long load times cause a bad user experience for your customers and increase the bounce rate on your website. Discover here six tools with which you can test the performance of your website.

Why is the loading time of my website so important?

Nowadays, good web design and engaging content are no longer enough to keep visitors to a website because if technically everything does not work as it should, users leave as quickly as they came. So a fast loading time has a big influence on the user experience of your customers here. But what does fast mean? Opinions on this subject vary enormously:

For Google Search Console, three seconds is already a high load time. The average is generally 1.5 to 3 seconds. However, the delay that a user perceives as long or fast does not play such a big role. One thing is certain: long loading times are very difficult.

To know precisely your loading time, a multitude of tools are available on the network. Today we present to you some tools that can help you optimize your performance.

What tools to measure the performance of your website?

PageSpeed ​​Insights

With this Google tool, you can analyze many sources of potential errors that have a negative impact on the loading time of your site. PageSpeed ​​Insights scans the URL you enter twice, first with a mobile user-agent and then with a computer user agent. Thus, the performance of your page is measured both on desktop computers and on mobile devices.

To do this, simply enter your URL in the given field to obtain, in addition to an evaluation of your loading time from 0 to 100 points, optimization possibilities for your page. The tool takes into account exclusively the independent aspects of the network, such as the server configuration, the HTML structure of a site, or even the use of external resources such as images or JavaScript and CSS. This tool is very easy to use, but it only gives you clues to speed up your loading time.

WebPageTest.org

On WebPageTest.org, you can do the same as with PageSpeed ​​Insights. However, in addition to your URL, you can specify from which location and with which browser the test should be performed. So you can, for example, determine if there are differences in website performance among users abroad or among those who use another browser. In addition to the absolute loading time, WebPageTest also gives you information on the perceived loading time. This is called “Load time”, or the time your site needs for visitors to estimate the finished load.

In addition, you obtain the results of measurement of values ​​like the “first byte”, that is to say, the time necessary for the transmission of the first byte of data between the client and the Web server, the “start render”, ie the loading time until the content of the page is displayed for the first time to the user or until “fully loaded”, the value at which your site is fully loaded, including all the scripts and the elements. With this tool, you get a multitude of KPIs, but it also causes some confusion in the presentation.

Which Loads Faster

If you want to compare the performance of two websites, Which Loads Faster is the perfect tool. To do this, indicate the URLs of the two sites to be reached for the analysis to begin. On the other hand, unfortunately, you don’t get suggestions on what you could change to optimize the loading time of your website.

Therefore, the tool is perfectly suited for a quick comparison, but for a detailed analysis, it is better to use another tool.

Ryte

Ryte’s Website Success module performance report not only provides insight into the performance of your entire website it also provides you with “time to first byte” information and load times for each URL.

In addition, it is possible to filter the “very slow” sub-pages to identify the files on which your server has too long a response time. This gives you complete information about the performance of your site and good starting points for optimizations. You can find the report in the Website Success module in performance> Loading time. In addition, by adding Google Analytics data, you can analyze which content has high bounce rates or low visit time and optimize it accordingly.

Yslow

This open-source tool was developed by Yahoo! and can be used as a bookmark, as a command center tool, or as a browser extension. Using the famous Firefox “Firebug” add-on, it analyzes your website with various sets of rules.

Yslow’s analysis of the website is based on 23 of 34 rules that influence the performance of a website according to Yahoo. The results are gathered in an overall score and a detailed list and ordered according to performance characteristics.

Whether it is text, image or JavaScript, the tool clearly shows through statistics what content is hampering your performance and gives you suggestions for improvement.

Pingdom

With Pingdom.com, you can analyze all parts of your website and get a summary of each element of a website (HTML, Javascript, and CSS files, images, etc.). You can filter and sort this list according to different aspects and thus identify possible difficulties of your website.

As with Yslow, you get a level of performance and tips with the test result that will help your page match Google Page Speed ​​best performance practices. In addition, you can observe the evolution of the performance of your page in the longer term since each test was recorded. Pingdom.com gives you tips for increasing performance; among other things Pingdom.com gives you tips on how to increase performance.

Conclusion

In terms of performance testing and website optimization, there are many interesting tools. Which one best suits your needs always depends on what you want to achieve and the precision required for the analysis data. So the “Which Loads Faster?” simply indicates how fast your site is compared to the competition, while Ryte and Yslow provide detailed information on the loading times of each content and URL, already allowing you to identify potential optimizations.

Even with these free tools, you can get good results, but if you need more details, you can use some paid tools for your Website Performance Check or Server Performance Check. In any case, website administrators should seriously consider the topic of website performance to improve the user experience on a given page and counter high bounce rates.