50% of people expect a site to load in less than 2 seconds!
Your site’s load time could be the difference between keeping visitors on your site or losing them to a competitor.
There are online tools that answer two of the most common questions web administrators and SEO’s ask when it comes to website performance:
- How fast is my website?
- How do I improve website performance?
To answer these questions, many website-monitoring solutions are available.
Naturally, you have to spend some money to get the best tool. Still, free alternatives offer performance monitoring suitable for small start-up companies. Testing server response time is a big part of the monitoring process. We made a list of the best tools to test website speed and performance.
Table of Contents
- Lighthouse
- GTMetrix
- Site 24×7
- WebPage Test
- Varvy Pagespeed Optimization
- Google PageSpeed Insight
- Pingdom
- Uptime
- PageSpeedPlus
- Treo
- MachMetrics
- SpeedCurve
- Speedrank
- MonitisAcquired by TeamViewer
- Uptrends
- Conclusion
Lighthouse
Price Range: €39 – €156 | Visit
Track your website performance over time and keep track of how it’s doing and get tips on what to improve — no coding required.
Know how long it takes for your site to connect and for each part of your page to load. See metric evolution over time.
Are you doing any SEO work or changing your site’s structure? Track the impact of code changes between deploys and act accordingly.
The scripts and stylesheets that come with ads, analytics, and social widgets can slow down your site. To help identify this issue, we created third-party charts to show you where your roadblocks are.
Find and fix what matters most. Along with Google’s Lighthouse & PageSpeed Insights audits, we’ll show you a curated list of performance rules.
See exactly how many stylesheets, scripts, images and videos are loaded on the page, how big they are and how long it takes.
Alerts are a vital tool in your web performance toolbox. They take the hassle out of monitoring your site by notifying you when your most important metrics cross a defined threshold.
SpeedFactor uses a custom-tailored Simulated User Monitoring audit, testing for raw data related to pageload timing and loads your website including all its elements—exactly like your users load it. By monitoring your site daily, you build a detailed picture of your website performance, and you’ll spot peaks in load times immediately.
GTMetrix
Price Range: Free – €12 – €47 | Visit
GTmetrix is an online application for testing web page speed. It offers free insight into page performance without a fee or even registration. Just visit the website, copy the URL of the page you wish to analyze and see the results. If you need more detailed monitoring, create a free account, or sign up for the paid version.
The results include performance scores, represented by grades from A to F for page speed and YSlow (a tool that tells you why your page is slow). Also, GTmetrix provides page details like page load time, its totals size, and the number of requests.
Site 24×7
Price Range: Free – €9 – €225| Has Free Trial | Visit
Site 24×7 is an alternative to Pingdom that offers a free version, along with small or premium plans.
This budget-friendly tool provides website, network, server, and application monitoring. User feedback for real user monitoring is also included. You can use it on Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, and OS X. The paid plan covers five complete server monitors and 50 alerts per month. The free version is limited to 5 server uptime monitors and ten alerts per month.
WebPage Test
Price Range: Free, on demand| Visit
WebPageTest is a free testing tool that runs speed tests from multiple locations around the world.
It takes into account the type of browser, device, connection speed, and cache state the user has to obtain concrete results. It offers advanced and straightforward testing, a visual comparison, and traceroute examination.
Advanced testing allows you to decide on the number of tests you want to run, get first and repeat view of the web page and capture of a video of the visual progress of loading.
Varvy Pagespeed Optimization
Price Range: Free, on demand | Visit
Varvy Pagespeed Optimization is a free, online tool used for optimizing speed.
After entering the web page URL, it gives you a summary and a 5-part report. The report examines your resources, CSS delivery, JavaScript usage, services, and page speed issues. Varvy has a useful selection of resource articles and tutorials to help you improve performance. The tool also has an entire section dedicated to SEO and mobile optimization guides.
Google PageSpeed Insight
Price Range: Free, on demand | Visit
Google PageSpeed Insight is an excellent free page speed testing tool.
Once you insert the URL of the page you want to check, it gives you an overall score for page speed. Based on that score, it tells you whether the web page is fast, average, or slow. There are two different scores you can earn – one based on the website’s mobile performance and the other on its desktop performance. Most importantly, the tool provides advice on how to optimize response time.
Pingdom
Price Range: €13+| Has Free Trial | Visit
Pingdom is one of the best performance monitoring services for business.
It provides web performance monitoring and uptime alerts by the minute. The tool gives an in-depth insight into page speed and performance expectations with SMS or email notifications. However, it does not have a free version. If you are unsure whether to commit to a subscription, try using its free 14-day trial.
Uptime
Price Range: €16 – €240| Has Free Trial | Visit
Uptime is a monitoring tool for websites, servers, and domains. It offers software for server monitoring, page speed monitoring, real user monitoring, and other services.
It has four different plans to choose from, none of which are free. What stands out is its 1-minute interval monitoring across six continents. The basic plan includes only 20 checks, while the Enterprise plan offers up to 500 checks. The platform offers a 21-day free trial. Use it to test out the tool and decide whether it is a good investment for your business.
PageSpeedPlus
Price Range: €10 – €100| Has Free Trial | Visit
Your important pages are automatically checked every day. If a URL falls below the thresholds you specify, it is tagged as failing. View the status of all your monitored URLs without having to manually test each one.
Analyse the PageSpeed score for every URL over time so you can see exactly when it dropped and relate changes back to code releases or content updates.
Scan every page on your website using the sitemap.xml so you can get the full picture of what your PageSpeed score is and unearth the slow pages buried deep in your information architecture.
Treo
Price Range: €80 – €400| Has Free Trial | Visit
Traditional web performance metrics are often technical and don’t reflect your customer’s journey. Treo is powered by Lighthouse and focuses on user experience metrics to help you to build delightful web experience.
MachMetrics
Price Range: Free – €20 – €130 | Visit
Recurring speed tests allow you to see exactly how your pages are performing over time.
Multiple devices, caching types, 7 worldwide regions. And with custom scripts to model cookies, multiple-page visits, and access protected areas – your abilities are endless.
Weekly (or monthly) summary reports ensure you’re aware of your performance stats without ever needing to login.
Access to all raw data ensure you can diagnose and fix any speed issue identified.
SpeedCurve
Price Range: €150 – €2000 | Has Free Trial | Visit
SpeedCurve LUX shows you how real users experience your site. In addition to showing you how fast your site is, it also shows you the impact of speed on UX and business metrics – including bounce rate, conversion rate, and session length. LUX helps you discover which design and development improvements will make your site faster, your users happier, and your business more successful.
SpeedCurve synthetic monitoring is built on top of WebPageTest (the best synthetic web performance testing tool available). With synthetic monitoring, you can test how fast your pages render on different browsers and devices in locations around the world. You can track dozens of web performance metrics – and create budgets and get alerts when they go out of bounds. And you can benchmark yourself against your competitors.
Speedrank
Price Range: €10 – €100 | No Free Trial | Visit
Speedrank helps you identify potential for improvement by automatically creating audits, reporting and sending it to you regularly via email.
Speedrank uses Google’s own technology and sees your page as Google sees it. The basis of the Speedrank analyzes is Google Lighthouse, an analysis tool for developers. Lighthouse analyzes web pages on request once and gives extensive, detailed reports.
Monitis
Acquired by TeamViewer
Price Range: €10 – €30| Has Free Trial | Visit
Do you know how long it takes for your page to fully load? A slow loading website will cause visitors to leave which consequently harms your conversions and lowers your ROI. With Page Load Monitoring by TeamViewer, you are constantly monitoring the time your website takes to fully load – from beginning to end, including all elements such as images, JavaScript and CSS. Uncover and fix bottlenecks due to broken scripts, or too large images, and provide your customers with an optimized end-user experience.
Uptrends
Price Range: €12 – €56| Has Free Trial | Visit
Web Performance Monitoring – Quickly identify the source of web performance issues in Chrome, Firefox and IE. Receive load-time alerts, and view errors in easy-to-use waterfall reports.
Uptrends opens up a real browser (Chrome, Firefox, or IE) on one of the worldwide locations you have selected and loads your website with all its elements—exactly like your users see it. You build a detailed picture of your website performance, and you’ll spot peaks in load times immediately.
Conclusion
With the help of these tools, you can monitor the speed and performance of your website.
Research all the possibilities and what they have to offer. Take advantage of the free trials. Then decide which software is best for your needs.
