4 Ways To Test Your Website Performance

What are the ways to test your website performance?

1. Choose the Right Testing Tools
2. Thorough and Incremental Testing
3. Consider the Cache

 

One of the most important factors when it comes to creating and running a website is making sure it has the fastest load speed possible. Back in the early days of ancient internet browsers, it was standard to wait a few seconds for elements to load. Nowadays, your potential audience will quickly close the window if there’s even a whiff of delay. This ties directly into customer experience, loyalty, and conversion. Don’t lose your audience and test your website performance thoroughly before launch.

 

Choose the Right Testing Tools

The World Wide Web has a full complement of programs for you to test your website performance with. Here are a few of the many options available for you to explore:

 

Google PageSpeed Insights

Google Pagespeed Insights is an openly available tool to the public that can run basic diagnostics on your site and make general recommendations on how to optimize performance.

 

Pingdom

Pingdom is also quite popular and does all that PageSpeed Insights can do and more. It tracks your website history and provides you with a very clean reporting format for easier optics. It is also very user-friendly as it fetches you the performance grade, total load time, and page size. It can also display a clear waterfall chart of your website’s speed test for you to study.

 

WebPageTest

WebPageTest works better for more advanced users. There is a steep learning curve in decoding the reports that it fetches, but it provides one of the most detailed overall metrics and analysis of your website’s performance. You can also run both cached and uncached views as well as simultaneous tests.

 

Monitis

Monitis allows you to monitor your uptime, page loading, and web load testing at real-time speed. You can check on how your website performs with peak traffic. It is also cloud-based, so you can run your metrics from anywhere and at any time.

 

Varvy

Varvy is a great choice for beginners and for those who just need basics with no frills. It is greatly simplified, but it may also not fetch all the performance data you need to fully diagnose your website.

 

Thorough and Incremental Testing

Users will enter your site through various channels and sources. They may enter through random pages, whether they are back-linked or re-routed via an external page. So regardless if the majority of your user traffic goes through the front page of your site, it’s imperative for you to test all the pages and check on their loading speeds. Then, improve the load times using key recommendations from your testing tools.

You also have to check various user locations on your test, as you will not be able to completely predict where all your audiences will be originating from. You can prioritize your main market and work from there, but you can retain all your incidental users with a thorough speed test from all angles.

With regard to the capacity of your site, you’ll want to do incremental testing by initially setting up a smaller number of generated users. As you go along with your test, increase the number gradually and check for slow-downs and bottlenecks. This is so you can monitor and fix your performance issues as you are ready with your website at each given stage. Test and run every cycle through analytics, diagnose, and carry on to a large scale.

 

Consider the Cache

The chances of a new and outside user stumbling upon a full-cached page that helps load your site faster is unlikely. Therefore, simulating a cached website is not a common scenario to play out and will most likely return more impressive but less realistic results.
Re-running the program can be deceiving, as your own computer will have created caches of your activity, so it’s not a reliable and real-time test. Caches can’t be relied on because they are temporary and can be isolated cases. It does not completely represent the majority of the expected visitors you’ll be having after you fully launch your site.

Add a cache buster first before you apply your test to ensure that your simulation depicts actual first-time visitors loading up your website without pre-loaded data. You are representing a closer real-time experience for unique and new users more accurately.

 

Key Takeaway

Remember that the tests that you run will fetch you metrics that are great for optics and reporting, but they are only a means to an end. If you yourself load the page and it feels slow, regardless of the reports and performance data you’ve gathered, then you are usually right. If it’s slow for you, then it’s possible that the run speed will not be impressive for your expected end-users. Revisit your bottlenecks and try to identify what improvements you need to apply. After all, you always have to develop your site with the end-user in mind, giving them the best possible seamless experience.