5 best website performance tools

Your website speed is linked to an increase in sales, traffic and a rise in your rank on search engines. However, to boost your website’s speed, it is important to first find out the problem areas that are slowing it down.

Here are 5 tools to enhance your website’s performance by finding the areas for improvement. These tools are a great asset for beginners and experienced professionals to help figure out the slow parts of the website. To optimize your performance you can utilise a blend of these tools.

Below we introduce 5 incredible tools that you can boost your website with on a daily basis, along with their advantages and disadvantages.

WebPageTest

WebPageTest is essentially a Google maintained tool used to test performance. It includes single or several servers that provide the work of web browsing robots, such as going to a website and submitting an in-depth report on the performance of that website based on its experience. 

The advantages include a thorough report of almost all elements of your website’s performance. You are presented with an array of locations, browsers and speeds of connection that you can choose from. It handles cached as well as uncashed views, along with running several years at the same time and performing certified scans.

Its disadvantages include a relatively archaic interface. You have to learn in-depth to get substantial results. Plus, if you have your eye on renowned servers or locations, you might have to wait your turn.

GTmetrix

GTmetrix is a tool that was developed with the goal of helping their user hosts to measure their website’s performance. It is an extremely popular tool used for testing the speed of your website in today’s day and age. GTmetrix provides impeccable advice on how to boost your website. It is extremely user friendly for both novices and professionals. It employs a blend of YSlow and Google Pagespeed insights to create reports as well as its recommendations.

Its advantages include an extremely user-friendly interface and free of cost monitoring for a single domain. It also provides a detailed performance metrics review of your entire website including all its aspects. Its interface includes educational steps. It also has the capability to perform certified scans.

Its disadvantages include receiving extremely inconsistent results when scans are performed one after the other. You can access detailed features only after registering yourself. Very limited options, as well as test locations, are provided on the free plan.

Varvy

Varvy is an SEO analyst and tool that functions online to provide you with an in-depth report of both applied and unapplied optimization as enforced by the guidelines of Google. It also includes various reports such as mobile optimization, SEO and speed testing. Its founder Patrick Sexton manages Varvy along with providing insight into several aspects such as HTTP header, AMP, etc which can prove to be extremely important for your SEO. 

Its advantages include a simple, modern and easy to use interface. It provides reports that are straightforward and simple to understand along with brilliant educational links that can help you with your website.

Its disadvantages include a lack of customised testing and merely providing ground level metrics of your performance.

Pingdom

Pingdom is a Sweden based organisation that provides a range of services that include monitoring the speed of your page, uptime, servers, transaction, as well as providing insights on your users. One of their key factors is the fact that they provide a speed testing tool for your website free of cost. It is also one of the most renowned tools for testing your performance among WordPress users. The reason for its popularity is that it is easy to implement for users of all levels. 

Its advantages include a simple straightforward interface that has properly arranged summary statistics with detailed waterfall charts and easy to comprehend reports.

Its disadvantages include no detailed tools included in the free option, unlike various other sites. Plus it has a fixed array of browser and location options. The performance grade it provides might not be accurate.

Google Pagespeed Insights

It is the most well-known tool along with the 5, but also the one that people have the most wrong idea of. The scores that grab people’s eyes might not be a true representation of the speed of your website. It can be quite frustrating to receive recommendations from Pagespeed that are beyond your control and are therefore not in your hands to fix. Results are also prone to change when run consecutively. This puts a spook in your wheel if you’re looking to optimise your website. Since the speed of your website dictates your rank on Google, it is preferable to keep a tab on the performance of your website using this tool.

Its advantages include an easy to use a simple interface that provides testing on both desktop and mobile. Your search results might find aid in recommendations provided by Google that are specific to it.

Its disadvantages include its inability to select locations and lack of consistency in results during various runs. 

  Conclusion

You need to ensure a boost in the speed of your website regardless of which one you choose. GTmetrix and WebPageTest provide their services free of cost. Pingdom’s tools, on the other hand, are a paid alternative that provides reports about issues that focus on spikes in traffic that make it impossible to conduct real-time monitoring.