Website loading speed is one of the most critical factors that can impact the overall growth of your business. You must do everything it takes to load your site below 3 seconds.
If your site takes more than 2 to 3 seconds, you are surely going to lose users and potential customers. No one likes a slow website.
After settings up your site, one of the first things you need to check is the loading time of your site. You can always customize the site design, the tools you use, the script, and other elements to make the site quicker.
There are a number of amazing speed testing tools for websites, we will have a look at the free website speed testing tools in this article.
Before going ahead with the tools, let’s first understand the things that impact the loading time of a site.
And there are other factors that will impact the loading time of your site.
How to Improve Loading Time of a Site?
We understand the loading time is critical and it can have a severe impact on the growth of the business. So, how to improve the loading time of a site?
There are a number of ways to improve the loading time of a site, before implementing any changes to your site; analyze your site using the speed testing tools mentioned in this article.
Some of the most common solutions to improve the overall loading time of a site is.
01. Switch to a Better Web Hosting
The quality of your hosting provider can have a severe impact on the loading time of your site, make sure to host your site only with the recommended hosting providers with a proven track record.
There are even free hosting options available for WordPress, but those hosting solutions can be good for hobby bloggers but surely not professional bloggers.
If you have the budget, you must consider going for top-quality fast hosting like Kinsta. There are a number of other good-quality hosting available.
Our site is currently hosted on WPX Hosting which is another great option from the performance as well as customer support point of view.
02. Minimize the Number of Plugins
If your site is on WordPress, the newbie users can be overwhelmed by the number of available plugins; make sure to use only the must-have WordPress plugins because every additional plugin will add extra seconds to the loading time.
You must also consider using a plugin like Asset CleanUp that will help you load only the plugins that are required on a page and make your site faster.
03. Use a CDN
Content Delivery Networks can be very useful in serving your site quickly by delivering the content through the nearest server around the world. You can start with a free CDN provider and then move to a more comprehensive option.
If you wish to know more about CDN, read this article to know about how to leverage the power of content delivery networks.
04. Optimize Script
Make sure to optimize the script of your site to improve the loading time of your site. If you are not good with code, you can get help from a professional to help you optimize your site.
05. Use Scaled Images
The images on your site have a severe impact on the loading time of your site, so always use a properly scaled and optimized image.
If you are confused about how to use properly scaled images. There are plugins available that will help you to get that done. You can also use services like TinyPNG to optimize your images before you upload them to your site.
There are a number of other factors that will impact the loading time of your site, you can analyze all the issues by using the following speed testing tools.
What Are The Top Website Loading Speed Checker Tools?
Website loading speed is more important than ever as Google made it clear that speed is one of the most important ranking factors and they are going to incorporate the Core Web Vitals as a part of the ranking algorithm.
So, make sure to check the loading speed of your site and improve it further. Here are the top tools to check website loading speed.
01. Google PageSpeed Insights
You need to take the recommendation by this tool very seriously, you already know why.
This tool is by Google, so if you wish to rank higher in the search results make sure to check the loading time of your site using this tool and implement the changes suggested by the tool.
Google Page Speed Insight will check the page speed for the desktop as well as the mobile version of your site. Try to score above 90 in this tool out of 100. If you can optimize your site to score 100 out of 100 that would be great for your site.
Google has recently announced that speed core vitals will be a part of the ranking algorithm in 2021. So, you have to make sure that your site is really fast and is within the parameters that are laid by Google.
Google Core Web Vitals
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): measures loading performance. To provide a good user experience, LCP should occur within 2.5 seconds of when the page first starts loading.
- First Input Delay (FID): measures interactivity. To provide a good user experience, pages should have an FID of less than 100 milliseconds.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): measures visual stability. To provide a good user experience, pages should maintain a CLS of less than 0.1.
02. GTmetrix
GTmetrix is one of the most popular website speed testing tools used by general users as well as developers to check the performance of a site.
This tool offers you a detailed analysis of your site, and the bottlenecks impacting your site so that you can improve on those parameters to improve the overall loading time of your site.
GTmetrix will analyze your site against the industry standard to let you know about the performance of your site. It will give you step-by-step details about the things that you need to improve.
The tool comes with a very simple and elegant design, you just have to paste the complete URL of your site in the bar and the tool will do the rest.
Top Features:
- User-friendly interface
- Detailed analysis of your page
- Complete loading time set against industry standard
- It will check both PageSpeed and YSlow metrics
03. Pingdom
Pingdom is another widely used website speed-testing tool. You will come across a wide recommendations of for this tool while discussing the loading time of a site.
The tool is quick and simple to use and it will check the speed of your site depending on the location of the server you select.
You have a number of server location options, you can select depending on the region you get the maximum traffic.
- Asia: Japan
- Europe: Germany
- Europe: United Kingdom
- North America: Washington DC
- North America: San Francisco
- Pacific: Australia
- South America: Brazil
You will have a detailed analysis of your page and you can work on the suggested areas to improve the loading time of your site.
04. Speed Test by Uptrends
Another very useful website speed testing tool by Uptrends. This will give you amazing insight into your business to make sure that you are able to optimize your site before it gets out of hand.
This tool gives you the option to check the speed of your site from a server around the world.
- Singapore
- Amsterdam
- Frankfurt
- Paris
- Sydney
- Berlin
- London
- Los Angeles
- New York
After testing your site, this tool will give you all the important details about your page such as the size of your page, what is impacting the speed of that site the most and the recommendation to get things done.
05. WebPageTest
Probably this tool should have been placed higher on this list. It is one of the most comprehensive solutions to check the loading time of any site.
The WebPageTest tool gives amazing flexibility to check the speed in different browser types and for different internet connection speed.
As far as the server location is concerned, the list will be very long to be placed here. You have the option to select the server from every corner of the world making it the top tool to check the speed of a page.
- Select the server location using the map
- Select internet speed
- Select the browser type
- Amazing comparison
06. Website Speed Test
Images are very important to make a site look attractive and to engage users. However, the images are one of the main reasons that slow down a site. So, you have to keep track of the images you use on your page to make sure that your page is light and quick.
This tool will make the process very simple and easy for you.
- Gives you the overall size of the images
- Gives you the individual image sizes
- Suggestion to compress the images
07. KeyCDN
Known for its CDN services, KeyCDN offers a number of useful free tools as well. The site loading speed testing tool is one of them.
It’s a very simple tool, all you need to do is to add your site URL and select the server location. It gives you the option of around 10 server locations to choose from.
Once you hit Test, it will take a couple of seconds to check the speed and give you the results. It will also give you the details of all the elements that might be impacting the loading speed of your site.
08. Sucuri Load Time Tester
Sucuri has a simple and user-friendly load time tester that will test the loading speed of your site from various server locations across the world at a time.
Just add your website link and hit the test load time button, it will take a couple of seconds to give you a complete idea of the overall loading speed of your site.
Final Word
The above-mentioned tools are the top options to check the speed of any website. Do use these tools and find out the loading time for your site and optimize it to improve the speed further.
We are testing a few more tools, so don’t forget to come back and check this list again to find the top website speed test tools.
