Last Updated on February 5, 2021
Something that cannot be measured, cannot be improved. This fits best for a website page speed as well.
And the best part is you can measure your website’s page load speed using one or many of the PageSpeed Tools mentioned in this post that are absolutely FREE to use.
You have got some great content with awesome value to offer but guess what, nobody will bother to read it if it loads really slow.
Or if the blog headline is really boring. But that’s a different topic.
Yes, page speed is one of the most important and crucial metrics of a site especially when a search engine like Google has included it as one of the Ranking Factors on its search results.
If at all SEO is not your primary concern, which shouldn’t be the case, a fast loading website will keep your visitors happy, increase the engagement on the site, provide an excellent user experience which all will result in high conversions.
If you still don’t believe me and want to know how important PageSpeed is for your Website and why you should take it seriously, you can head over to my in-depth article about Why PageSpeed is Important for your Website.
What is an Ideal Page Load Time?
According to the average industry standard, an ideal page load time for a fast website is 3 seconds or less and is considered excellent. While 5 seconds or less is considered good, 8 seconds or less is Fair whereas 9 seconds or above is rated as Poor.
To back up this claim, a study shows 53% of the mobile site visitors leave a website if it takes more than 3s to load and the number skyrockets to 74% if it takes longer than 5s to load.
How to use PageSpeed Tools?
Using a Page Speed Test Tool is pretty simple and does not require you to be a tech savvy. In fact, a 10-year-old can use these tools with ease.
All you need to do is enter the website’s URL of which you want to test the speed for and press enter (most of the times).
Within a few seconds, the test will be completed and the analysis report for the website will be presented to the user.
Moving ahead, this post talks about all the Best and FREE Website Speed Testing Tools that I have ever come across and found them useful.
Each tool has its own set of parameters for benchmarking a site speed so you might find different scores or rankings accordingly.
Although the primary metrics that almost all these page load time testing tools abide by are the Page Load Time, Size of Page, Time to First Byte, PageSpeed Score/Grade, Requests etc.
You can initially try all of them and check which one seems more accurate or which one rates a website on factors that are more relevant to you than others.
After analyzing and choosing your favourite tool, I would advise you to stick with it and optimize your site according to the tool’s recommendation.
Gary Illyes, the Webmaster Trends Analyst from Google, says
“Each tool has a set of different metrics but each metric on its own makes perfect sense to improve. No tool is perfect and normally I’d tell you which one is the closest, but in this case is really about picking one that you like.”
So lets quickly dig in and find out some amazing PageSpeed Testing Tools.
1. Google PageSpeed Insights
PageSpeed Insights is Google’s most popular and widely used website speed test tool.
Almost every webmaster has tried and tested this tool at least once if not many.
You can test the page’s performance on both mobile and desktop devices using this tool.
Google PageSpeed Insights analyzes the content of a web page, then generates suggestions to make that page faster.
Insights tool gives a speed score for the page’s performance which is based on the lab data analyzed by Lighthouse.
A score of 90 or above is considered fast, and 50 to 90 is considered average. Below 50 is considered to be slow.
The tool provides you with 2 major sets of data, one about debugging issues that are reflected in the lab data report and other being the real-world issues that are contained in the field data report.
There is one more report given out as origin summary that consists of a Chrome User Experience report.
The reason this tool has got the top spot in our listings is majorly due to the fact it is owned by Google.
Google is the largest search engine on earth with more than 90% of all internet searches taking place through Google and the company subsidiary Youtube.
So when Google recommends, suggest or advice you something you better listen.
Therefore the performance report given at the end of the test is in the best interest of the webmasters and readers as well.
This tool is easy-to-use and is developed to make your web pages fast on all devices.
All you need to do is enter the site’s URL and press the Analyze button. The process will take a few seconds and you will be presented with a mobile and desktop speed score reports.
Go through the report as it will show you the Diagnostics, Passed Audits and Opportunities for your site to score better by improving in some fields.
PageSpeed Insights Tool analyze the website code instead of checking the historical load times.
And if you’re are scoring low on the mobile page speed score don’t be disheartened as scoring decently on a mobile page is difficult.
Most of the time reason behind this low score is because your WordPress theme is using render-blocking JavaScript and CSS. You can leave it for the time being as it is not worth the efforts.
All-in-all Google’s PageSpeed Insights is a great speed analysis tool and one of my personal favourite.
2. GTmetrix
This is a great tool to analyze your site’s speed and make it faster and is insanely popular among the webmasters.
GTmetrix gives you insight on how well your site loads and provides actionable recommendations on how to optimize it.
To use the tool, you just need to enter the URL of the website to test and press the Analyze button and GTmetrix will show you the Latest Performance Report assigning a grade from A to F to your website.
The report includes the performance scores that is the average of Google’s PageSpeed score and Yahoo’s YSlow score. It also displays the page load details like time, size and number of requests and finally recommendations are made.
Furthermore, an in-depth analysis data can be tracked down in the Waterfall, Video, and Report History sections of the report.
There are various analysis options in GTmetrix i.e. you can test your site from 7 different test regions, 3 different browsers and various connection types. It also supports HTTP/2.
You can signup and try GTmetrix for free which gives more than sufficient information about your site.
But if you are a professional and want to deep digger in the analysis game with advanced analytics features, you can go for a PRO version of the tool.
You will be presented with advanced features like Monitor Pages, Set up Monitored Alerts, Test from Multiple Regions, Analyze with Mobile, Video Capture and Developer Toolkit.
3. Pingdom Website Speed Test
It is an easy-to-use tool built by Pingdom to help webmasters and web developers everywhere to analyze their website load speed, find bottlenecks in a website and optimize their website performance.
It is a great tool and is useful for both experts as well as novices.
Pingdom Website Speed Test offers cost-effective and reliable uptime and performance monitoring for your website.
They use more than 70 global polling locations to test and verify customers’ websites 24/7, all year long.
With Pingdom, you can monitor your websites’ uptime, performance, and interactions for a better end-user experience.
It is also super easy to use and doesn’t require any sought of expertise.
You enter a site’s URL and choose one of the seven servers that Pingdom has in 7 different geographical locations and press Start Test button. (Tip: Choose a server that is closest to your site’s web host server for a better understanding of the speed report).
Your site’s report card will show the Performance grade i.e. a score between 0-100, Page Size, Load Time, and Number of Requests to the browser of your website.
You will also be presented with additional useful page performance metrics in the form of suggestions with a grade.
The speed testing tool displays all of your site’s results in a waterfall view which can be filtered by file size, load time and load order. You can also download or share the results.
Pingdom Website Speed Test is a FREE tool to use but you can also buy the premium version of the tool for more advanced features and analytics.
4. WebPage Test
This is another great page speed test tool that was originally developed by AOL and was open sourced in 2008. And since then is actively developed on GitHub.
Using the WebPage Test Tool run a free website speed test from multiple locations around the globe using real browsers and at real consumer connection speeds.
You can run simple tests or perform advanced testing including multi-step transactions, video capture, content blocking and much more using this tool.
Your results will provide rich diagnostic information including resource loading waterfall charts, Page Speed optimization checks and suggestions for improvements.
Another great benefit of using the tool is the support for HTTP/2, which is the future of web development.
Enter a website URL, choose a preferred server location from more than 65 locations to select from, and finally choose a browser and hit Start Test button.
The search results are powered by Akamai and the tool runs 3 times before giving out results.
The result summary page will display the Load Time, First Byte, Start Render, Speed Index, First Interactive and more.
You’ll receive a different grade for each of the following metrics like First Byte Time, Keep-alive Enabled, Compress Transfer, Compress Images, Cache static content, and Effective use of CDN.
It’s a popular and widely acclaimed website speed test tool.
5. Site 24×7
Analyze web page and optimize website performance with is amazing PageSpeed Test Tool.
Site 24×7 optimize your website by checking the impact of scripts, images and other resources loaded via sub-domains on this web page.
It’s free to use but you can also create an account with Site 24×7 to unlock more awesome features.
This Webpage Analyzer tool is designed to evaluate server environment performance as it relates to webpage speed and integrates with various other system administrator tools.
The tool provides an easy-to-read waterfall graph that displays what loads on your webpage and when.
Simply plug in the URL and press the Analyze button to begin the test.
And you’ll be presented with a full page analysis report demonstrating a grade for the PageSpeed Score, Page Load Time, Number of Requests and Page Size.
The final report is divided into three categories namely, Response Time Summary, Web Page Summary, and Page Speed Insights.
Site 24×7 also has some more tools to offer to its users that are equally good and well designed.
6. Google Mobile Website Speed Testing Tool
This is another great free tool by Google that is primarily focused on mobile page speed of a website.
According to Google, most of the sites across the globe lose half of their visitors while loading. Click To TweetWhich makes it more important for a site to optimize their page speed.
And since more than 50% of the internet traffic comes from mobile devices, Google with its initiative ‘think with Google’ has partnered with WebPageTest.org to develop this tool.
You enter the site URL and press enter to continue. It takes up to a few seconds to analyze your website and generate a report for it.
The Google Mobile Website Speed Testing Tool will show you the loading time (sec) on a 3g network and the percentage of estimated visitor loss due to loading time.
You will also get your industry comparison and top fixes to optimize your site for a better loading time.
According to this tool, if your site loads in 3s or less it is rated as Excellent, 4.1-5s as Good, 5.1-8s as Fair, and above 8s as Poor.
You can download your free report for your site which will be emailed to you.
7. KeyCDN Website Speed Test
This a simple page speed test tool from KeyCDN that includes a waterfall breakdown and the website preview.
Enter a URL and choose any of the 14 test locations that this tool offers and press the test button. And BOOM.
KeyCDN Website Speed Test is a fast and lightweight page speed test tool that gives you the control to make your website test results private or public.
This tool offers information such as the size of the page requested, load time, number of HTTP request made, status and timeline. It also has support for HTTP/2.
Though it doesn’t give you a detailed report about the website but only some key indicators.
KeyCDN Website Speed Test Tool also shows the preview of your website and is free to use.
KeyCDN also offers some other useful tools like Performance Test, IP Location Finder, Ping Test, DNS Lookup, HTTP/2 Test and many more.
8. Uptrends
Uptrends is a premium website speed test tool that has a free version as well to get started with.
The tool looks well designed with a clean and simple user interface and provide detailed insights into your website in a well-organised way.
It offers the functionality to run the speed test on both Desktop and Mobile devices.
Using this tool is pretty simple, you plug in the site’s URL, choose a server location from 9 available locations, select a device like a desktop or mobile, make a choice on the browser, screen size and Bandwidth throttling and finally start the test.
You will be presented a report in a waterfall breakdown and domain groups.
It will also provide you with General Information that’ll include Google PageSpeed Score, Load Time, Size, Requests, Location, Device, Browser and Connection.
Performance improvement opportunities will be briefed up by the tool as well.
On upgrading to a premium plan you’ll get some additional advanced features with the tool.
Uptrends also offer some other good tools like Free Website Monitoring, Uptime Check, Traceroute, DNS Report, What’s my IP? and more.
9. Varvy Pagespeed Optimization
It’s a free and simple to use tool for testing out your website’s speed.
Just plug in the website URL and press the Test button and wait for the magic to happen.
On completion of the test, you’ll be presented with a detailed report of your website. Everything on one single page.
Everything that needs to be taken take of will be listed below the summary.
The analyzed information is so in-depth, it might get overwhelming for a first time user.
You get the Server, Page, and Resources Information in the summary report.
On scrolling down, you’ll find a ton of information about image optimization, browser caching, server response time and more.
Varvy Pagespeed Optimization Tool uses more of a graphical representation of what could be fixed on your site, such as to render blocking.
10. DareBoost
DareBoost is a great website speed testing tool that also specializes in web performance monitoring and website analysis.
With DareBoost you can also compare the performance of your web pages and those of your competitors.
Detect strengths and weaknesses of each at a glance. Highlight your optimization results with before/after comparison reports.
Dareboost is also a powerful benchmarking tool to make sure your optimization efforts will be part of a pragmatic process looking for ROI.
Test the speed of your web pages at a glance and find on the same report all major indicators of technical performance and user experience (Speed Index, Start Render and more).
Although DareBoost is a premium tool, you can generate 5 reports per month with the free version of the tool.
Enter the site’s URL and press Analyze my site button.
Within seconds you will be provided with a Quality and Performance Report which can be downloaded and shared.
A percentage score out of 100 will be given along with issues, improvements, and successes of your site.
The tool will show tips, things to improve, and best practices that are organised by categories and also supports HTTP/2.
You can also analyze easily your results the video replay and an interactive waterfall.
The report analyzes over 80 different data points, across the following categories:
Cache policy, Number of requests, Security, Accessibility, Compliance, Quality, jQuery, Browser Rendering, Data amount, and SEO.
DareBoost is free to use but there is also a premium version of the tool available that gives additional functionality and control to the user.
11. Dotcom-Tools
Dotcom-Tools developed by Dotcom-Monitor is another premium speed test tool that can be used for free for 30 days.
It enables you to instantly test your website speed in real browsers from 25 locations worldwide.
Dotcom-Monitor is a web performance company based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. They monitor websites, servers and applications for availability, speed and functionality from our worldwide network.
Dotcom-Monitor’s website speed test enables users to test their website from 25 locations worldwide, including cloud-based tests (Amazon-US-East) and from behind the Great Firewall of China (Shanghai, China).
Once a test is complete, users can select “details”, drilling into robust performance reports and waterfall chart analysis. Users may also select which browser they’d like to test from.
This test supports Chrome, Firefox, IE & mobile browsers including iPhone, iPad and more! Dotcom-Monitor is continually developing performance tools to help users, webmasters, and developers improve their sites and their experience on the web.
Enter the website URL, select the browser and server location, and press Start Test button.
And you will get the Page Load Results and Page Speed Insights for your website.
The Web Performance Report Includes Summary by location, 10% of fastest elements, 10% of slowest elements, Comprehensive waterfall chart, Breakdown by host element – including DNS, Connection, SSL, Request, First packet, and Download, Error check and diagnostics.
You can also view the detailed summary, waterfall, error details, hosts, and fastest/slowest elements with this tool.
A cool feature about this tool is the feature of automating the test for the website.
12. Load Impact
The tool offers a free website performance test that is limited to 50 reports per month with a free version, analyzing the consequences of having 25 concurrent users on your website and the impact this modest traffic has on-site speed.
Load Impact is a SaaS performance testing solution for modern DevOps teams.
You can easily load test your website or web app by Creating test scenarios based on Virtual Users (VUs) and simulated traffic configurations to ensure you get the performance you need to meet user demand.
Enter the website URL and press the Run Free Test button.
The test breaks down in three sections i.e. Breakdown tree, URL table, and Test script.
The tool displays top-level statistics such as bandwidth usage, the number of requests per second, and requests made.
Load Impact displays a useful graph, demonstrating how your load time changes when more users visit your website.
You can also filter the test results according to your requirements and priorities.
You can opt-in for a 30 day trial with up to 50 tests and access to all premium features.
13. Web Page Analyzer
Web Page Analyzer is a free Website Performance Tool and Web Page Speed Analysis Website Optimization.
All you got to do is enter a URL and click submit to calculate page size, composition, and download time.
On scrolling down the analysis page, the tool provides analysis and recommendations on specific aspects of your site’s performance and recommends you the metrics that can be improved further.
The diagnosis includes Global Statistics, Object Size Totals, External Objects, Download Times, and Page Objects.
The script calculates the size of individual elements and sums up each type of web page component.
Based on these page characteristics the script then offers advice on how to improve page load time.
The script incorporates the latest best practices from Website Optimization Secrets, web page size guidelines and trends, and website optimization techniques into its recommendations.
The tool will inform as to how long your site takes to fully load on different connection speed.
14. YSlow
Next on our list is a tool created by a search engine that ruled the internet back in time i.e. Yahoo.
YSlow works as an add-on in the browser hence needs to installed before use. Although it supports every browser for that matter and is completely free to use.
YSlow analyzes web pages and why they’re slow based on Yahoo!’s rules for high-performance websites.
Yahoo!’s Exceptional Performance team has identified 34 rules that affect web page performance. YSlow’s web page analysis is based on the 23 of these 34 rules that are testable.
YSlow grades web page based on one of three predefined rulesets or a user-defined ruleset.
It offers suggestions for improving the page’s performance and summarizes the page’s components.
The tool also displays statistics about the page and provides tools for performance analysis.
Once the testing is complete, YSlow grades your website from A to F for each pre-defined parameter which can be improved later.
The downside of the tool is the non-maintenance for more than 2 years now.
15. Geek Flare
Next on our list is another completely free website speed test tool that is new to this industry.
Geek Flare is an amazing tool to find out how much time it takes to load your site from multiple locations across devices.
You can test how fast your website is on Mobile & Desktop.
Geek Flare’s speed testing tool lets you check the web page from multiple locations across devices and provide the following essential metrics instantly.
The metrics include Time to First Byte, Fully loaded time, Page size, Full page screenshot, Number of requests, Content breakdown by type & domain, Waterfall requests, and PageSpeed Insights.
Just enter your site’s URL, choose a device and select a server before pressing the Test Now button.
The waterfall report this tool provides looks clean and clearly understandable.
There is a request breakdown according to the type and response code.
The tool is free to use and can be used for numerous URL’s.
16. Yellow Lab Tools
This is a free and open source tool designed and developed by a GitHub user, Gaël Métais, which audits your website on parameters like Front-end code Quality, WebPerf, and JS Profiling.
It also gives in-depth details so that developers can correct the detected issues.
Yellow Lab Tools also gives you an option to choose the stimulating device as Desktop, Tablet, or Mobile before running the test.
You can also tweak a bund of advanced settings in this tool.
Enter the URL and click the Launch Test button to begin the test.
It is not the fastest PageSpeed Test Tool around though but offers some unique features that are not seen in other such tools.
Your site is awarded a Global Score out of 100 based on many calculated parameters like Page Weight, Requests, jQuery, Scroll Bottlenecks, Bad CSS, Bad Javascript and more.
The results are shareable and you can also access the JS Timeline with this tool.
17. Sucuri Load Time Tester
Sucuri Load Time Tester is another good tool from Sucuri, Inc which can test the performance of any of your sites from across the globe with just a few clicks.
This tool measures how long it takes to connect to your site and for one page to fully load.
A very important value which the tool relies upon is the “time to the first byte”, which shows how long it took for the content to be sent back to the browser to start processing the page.
Using it is pretty simple. You need to fill in the URL and press the Test Load Time button.
And your website will be analyzed from more than 15 different servers across the globe.
The results page will show the location, website Url, connection, first byte, and total time of your website.
At the bottom, the Average Response Time and Global Performance Grade will be given for the website.
Information in the form of a graph is also displayed for a better understanding of the data.
Sucuri Load Time Tester tool is free to use and the results are easily understandable.
18. Pagelocity
Pagelocity is a web application for analyzing, optimizing and monitoring web pages. It has its own page speed test tool.
Put in the URL and click the Go button to begin the test. The tool will take a couple of seconds to analyze your site.
On completion of the test, your site will be overall rated on a scale from 0-100.
Moreover, you will also get a score and detailed report for your site’s On-Page SEO, Performance, and Code Insights.
Code view report given by the tool is somewhat unique and is helpful in digging deep in the website analysis game.
Additionally, you will also be shown the Critical Issues, Minor Issues, and Rules Passed by your site.
With this tool, you can also track the performance of your competitors.
You can signup for a free account with Pagelocity.
The interesting part about the tool is the support for a mobile app and chrome extension.
19. PerfTool
Next comes an open source page speed test tool that is developed by Devbridge Group and is hosted on GitHub.
PerfTool collects information about your website and displays it in an easy-to-digest manner.
This tool package displays statistics about your web pages, including Google PageSpeed Insights score, resources count, and recommendations on how to fix performance issues, HTML errors and much more in one custom view.
With PerfTool you can run multiple tests for Google PageSpeed Insights.
Then, compare results from previous tests, set a score threshold and get detailed reports about your tests.
You can check your pages for HTML errors, get an external resources count and size, check load times and much more.
There are more than 200 indicators for your accessing a site’s performance in this tool.
PerfTool needs to be installed and the package is a combination of three plugins: Google PageSpeed Insights – to test page performance, dev-perf – to get statistics about your page, and w3cjs – to validate HTML.
Conclusion
So there you have it. I have spilt out every PageSpeed Tool I know and have ever used.
Some are really amazing and give a detailed report of your website speed mentioning every problem or opportunity that your site has, which can be worked upon to improve the load time of a page.
Although you might experience slight discrepancies in some tools or difference in speed scores across tools. The major reason behind this is the different server locations that each tool uses to analyze your website.
Tool servers that are close to your website host server will show faster speeds and vice versa.
Therefore it is advisable to use and stick with one reliable page speed tool and optimize your website accordingly.
But these tools will provide you with a detailed analysis report that can be used to overcome the weak spots and better optimize the site for SERP’s.
So which is your favourite tool in the list, or which tool you use the most? Tell us in the comment section below.
It’s a wrap then. Will see you in the next post.
If you find the article helpful and useful, share it with your friends and family or anyone who needs it the most.
And if you have any suggestions, questions or thoughts on the same, please leave a comment below and I will reply to all of them.
You can also subscribe to our blog to get all the future post delivered directly to your inbox.
