Did you know that you only have five to seven seconds to get the attention of your visitors?  In this post I will provide you three tools to measure the speed and performance of your website.

#1 GTmetrix

The first tool I would like to talk about is GTmetrix. GTmetrix allows you to easily analyze your website. You fill in the URL of your website and within a few seconds you will receive a report. The report provides you two scores, based on Google PageSpeed and YSlow.

The scores are subdivided into different parts. You can unfold these parts to receive additional information about the files which slow down your website. By pressing the “What’s this mean” button, you will be provided with information about how to solve the concerning issue. By following these tips and suggestions you are able to increase your overall score and thus your websites’ performance.

GTmetrix also provides you with an overview of which files are being loaded, where they are being loaded from and how long it takes for your website to load this specific file. This information can be found at “Waterfall”.

#2 Pingdom

The Pingdom Website provides scores based on eight different parts. Just like GTmetrix, every part can be unfolded to view additional information about files taking down your score. Kingdom redirects you to the documentation of Google. This documentation includes a lot of useful tips to increase your overall score.

Pingdom provides an extensive overview of locations being used to load content. For example, if you use Google Ads, then you will see the URL of Google in this overview. This is due to the fact that your website creates a request to Google in order to display Google Ads. The report also provides an overview of the order in which files are being loaded into your website and how many seconds this request takes to complete, just like GTmetrix does.

#3 Google Pagespeed

Google has also developed a tool to measure the speed and performance of your website. The Google Pagespeed tool provides you a clear overview of files slowing down your website. This overview is concisely compared to GTmetrix and Pingdom, but results in a to the point action plan as well. Google also differentiate desktop and mobile by providing two different scores. This allows you to focus your optimization more precisely.

However, the measurement of Google is much stricter. Google does provide a lower score if only one file does not meet the requirements. For example, you will receive a lower score if your images are not optimized, which is correct. Unfortunately Google will provide you the same score even when only one (!) image isn’t optimized and the rest of your website is.

Unfortunately optimizing your files and software won’t always provide you with the highest score possible. The hardware your webserver is using has a much larger impact on loading times. We recommend to check if you are able to gain speed improvement by hardware as well. For example, make sure to use SSD hosting which can be ten times faster than ‘regular’ storage. Interested in what we are able to do for your websites’ performance? Feel free to contact us and we will be glad to assist you.