Google Website Performance has never been more important. This article covers the 3 google website performance testing tools you should be utilizing to make sure your website is ranking at the top of Google’s PageSpeed Insights.
Here are the best Google website performance testing tools.
Sematext
While still being new to the Sematext Suite, Synthetics is a synthetic monitoring tool that has quickly become a favorite amongst our users. It’s simple yet reliable and you can monitor API and website uptime from multiple locations across the globe, measure performance across devices and browsers, and identify issues with third-party resources.
Getting started is really easy and only takes a couple of minutes before you start to actually monitor your resources with the help of the intuitive UI. You can set up different conditions that will trigger an alert so you’ll be immediately notified when something goes wrong.
Sematext Synthetics comes with a 14-day trial. Plans start from $29/month offering 40 HTTP and 5 browser monitors with data retention of 30 days. Of course, this can all be customized to fit your needs but that’s not all. You can also choose to go with the Pay-as-you-go plan which lets you set up individual monitors for $2/month.
Pingdom Speed Test
Pingdom is another well-known website speed test tool that’s been around for ages. It requires no login to use and the reports are less detailed then what you’d get from Google PageSpeed Insights. The site’s performance is graded from 0 to 100 and then has a breakdown of the response codes, content size, request types, requests by domain and a waterfall chart that lets you see details on your files load times.
Their free tool allows you to run a single test from any of their 70 locations and if you sign up to their Synthetics solution which starts at $10/month for 10 uptime checks you can set up page speed monitoring as well as alerting.
Google PageSpeed Insights
For years Google PageSpeed Insights has been the go-to tool for testing and grading your website. It’s a simple tool created by Google that benchmarks websites and grades them on a scale of 1 to 100 for both mobile and desktop. The higher the number, the faster the website is.
The UI is quite easy with only one input field for the URL. Once the test is run you’ll get detailed information about things like render-blocking code, TTFB, page sizes, and more. Under each section, you’ll get a list of recommended paths of action that should help speed up the website.
While many other tools in this list allow you to customize requests, set up alerts, and select different locations to run your tests, Google PageSpeed Insights will not give you those options. On the other hand, it’s completely free and doesn’t require registration.
Lighthouse in Chrome
Lighthouse is an open-source site testing tool included with Google Chrome. You can visit any website, open the Chrome developer tools, and run a site audit from the “Lighthouse” tab. It is a good idea, however, to run Lighthouse with Chrome in incognito mode, so that no Chrome extensions interfere with the performance test.
Lighthouse comes with Google Chrome and can easily be run from within the browser, such as this test for Walmart.com.
This is the same tool that contributor Hamlet Batista references in “Assessing Google’s ‘Core Web Vitals’ on Shopify Themes,” and “Page Speed Scores of Every Shopify Theme.” Taking a look at how he compared Shopify themes is a helpful way to understand just what Lighthouse can do for your company.
Perhaps the best thing about the Lighthouse tool is that it offers specific performance recommendations. A small business owner, for example, could ask her developer to get the Lighthouse performance score to 90 or above, without having to understand all of the associated technical issues.
In Chrome, Lighthouse makes specific recommendations for improving a website’s performance.
Test My Site
Think with Google, a resource site to share research and insights, includes a free “Test My Site” tool. It provides similar results as Lighthouse and may even rely on it.
Test My Site is another easy-to-use performance testing tool. It provides similar results as Lighthouse.
Test My Site focuses on mobile site speed and user experience, and it has several compelling features.
This is an example Test My Site report for Walmart.com.
For example, when Test My Site makes speed-improvement recommendations, it first displays “high impact” changes to help prioritize.
Almost all of the tool’s recommendations include links that explain in detail the recommendations or solutions.
The Test My Site tool allows you to compare your site’s performance to leading competitors. Enter a competitor’s URL and see a load time result. The tool is also helpful for benchmarking your site against industry peers.
Test My Site lets you compare your website’s speed to a set of competitors, such as this example with Amazon.com, Kols.com, Walmart.com, and Target.com.
Test My Site also offers an incentive to improve with its return-on-investment evaluator. Enter your site’s number of average monthly visitors, an average conversion rate, and an average order value. The tool estimates how much more revenue your business would generate with a faster site. While it is likely very rough, the estimate is certainly interesting.
Want to know how much site performance is impacting revenue? Test My Site offers an estimate.
Advanced Lighthouse
The same Lighthouse audit tool available in Google Chrome can also be accessed (i) from a command line, (ii) via a Node.js module, or (iii) as part of a continuous integration workflow.
While they require more technical expertise, these Lighthouse options can be powerful to conduct site performance audits, including automated ones.
Lighthouse Command Line Interface (CLI). The first of these “advanced” uses allows you to run Lighthouse from a terminal. You will need Google Chrome loaded on your computer. But otherwise, once it is installed, type the following to generate a report for Walmart’s website, for example.
lighthouse https://walmart.com
In this example, the tool will open the audit report in Chrome.
You can also pass parameters to change the output to receive the audit as a comma-separated-value (CSV) file or in JavaScript Object Notation (JSON). This example would return JSON:
lighthouse https://walmart.com ---output json --output-path <path/for/output.json>
A developer familiar with writing command-line applications or batch files could use the Lighthouse CLI to automate audits, perhaps, running them on a schedule.
Lighthouse Node Module. Lighthouse can also be used programmatically via a Node.js module, making it available to many, if not most, modern web development projects. The tool could run on a schedule, and output to a file or database for on-going analysis.
Lighthouse CI. For sites using continuous integration, Lighthouse CI can become part of the development workflow, automatically testing the site’s performance each time new code is checked in.
Uptrends
Uptrends let you quickly check your site performance and provide the following essential metrics.
- Load time
- Page size
- Requests made to load the page
- Improvement recommendation
- Request waterfall and breakdown
Uptrends got servers worldwide, which you can choose to test from.
- Singapore
- Amsterdam
- Berlin
- Frankfurt
- London
- Los Angeles
- New York
- Sydney
- Paris
If your target audience is global, then it’s critical to ensure your page loads within the expected time globally.
As you can see above, you have an option to test on Desktop and Mobile from Chrome, Firefox, IE, and Phantom JS.
Sematext
Sematext Synthetics is an intuitive, easy-to-use, and reliable monitoring tool that monitors the availability of your APIs and websites from multiple locations across the globe measures performance across devices and browsers and identifies issues with third-party resources.
You can use Sematext Synthetics to measure over 25 website performance metrics, including the essential ones:
- Core Web Vitals
- Page speed and load times
- Number of requests
- Page sizes
- Time to first byte
- First meaningful paint
- HTTP headers
- Request waterfall
Get going with Sematext in a matter of minutes and access all the features and when you are ready, you’ll be able to choose from three different plans. There’s a cheap pay as you go plan that starts at $2 per month, a Standard plan for $29 per month and the Pro is $99.
Website Audit
A modern tool for a modern website.
Geekflare Website Audit is powered by Google Lighthouse to test the site for more than 40 metrics in performance and best practices. You can select to check using a desktop or mobile.
Some of the essential tested metrics are:
- Time is taken to load the first byte
- Fully load time
- HTTP/2
- Number of requests and page size
- Resource minification
- Compression
- Image size
- Interactive request waterfall
and a lot more…
Gui Performance Testing Tools Open Source
Conclusion
When trying to improve your website’s speed, it can be difficult to tell if your site is improving. The tools that Google provide are very helpful, but they’re also very limited. You may have found that you can’t view historical data on some of these tools, which makes it even more difficult. But there are other tools available which you can use to analyze your site’s speed over time.