For all ecommerce websites, page speed has an impact not only on its performance, but also on user experience. When pages are slow to load on an eCommerce website, visitors are less likely to engage with a brand. Actually, a one-second delay in page response can result in a 7% loss in conversion and 11% fewer page views. So only with regular testing the speed of your website you can catch bottlenecks and improve the experience of visitors. As an ecommerce development company we know that there is nothing worse when your pages are slow to load, but we can help you out with that issue.
There is a great variety of website speed test tools to ensure everything is functioning as it should. So below read about the list of best 7 website speed test tools for testing the performance of your Magento stores.
Google PageSpeed Insights
It is a free tool that helps you check the performance of your website for mobile and desktop devices, and then suggest specific ways to improve the site also. Suggestions for optimization are based on general web performance metrics, including resource caching, data upload, and download size. Moreover, they are sorted by topic – speed, UX, and by order of priority – from the most important rules to approved ones. It will help you choose which steps to take first since they’ll have a bigger impact on your site in general.
The score is in the range of 0-100 points.The higher the score the better optimized your site is.
So if you want to know what exactly to change - Google will tell you.
Price: Free.
Pingdom Tools
It is another free online tool that can be used to test, analyze and learn how to make your website load time faster. It’s similar to Google’s tool as it also provides best practices you can follow to increase the speed and health of your website. The reports provided by Pingdom include a waterfall breakdown, performance grade, overall page analysis, and performance history tracing. Displaying a colourful and graphic-oriented interface, you can immediately identify the most urgent actions to take.
Moreover, Pingdom Tools gives you a performance mark and your rank according to the speed of the other tested websites.
Price: There are free and premium versions. Starter – $14.95/month. Standard – $45.95/month. Advanced – $89.95/month. Professional – $249/month.
YSlow
The next tool you can use for the Magento speed test is YSlow, which you integrate as an extension in your browser. It’s analysis based on Yahoo!’s 23 rules that constitute a matrix for website performance. YSlow analyzes web pages and shows statistics about the page loading time. Moreover, after testing a website you will receive the specific grades for each area, from that, you will determine which areas are needing your attention and improvements.
Price: Free.
GTmetrix
GTMetrix is another free webpage test tool that shows how fast your ecommerce website loads and provides detailed information on what’s making your site load slowly. It has a huge advantage: it analyzes your website performance combining Google PageSpeed and YSlow. On the result page, will be displayed performance scale, fully loaded time, page weight, and a certain number of requests. The results are graded and the color code indicates the health of the parameter. The parameters are sorted based on the order of impact on the score. Besides, similar to other tools, it makes suggestions on how to tune up your ecommerce website.
GTMetrix offers a Pro level upgrade that grants access to a wide variety of features, such as exportable detailed reports, page settings, website monitoring, tests from multiple locations, automatic alerts, and creation of video reports to visualize load time step by step.
Price: You can choose between a free version or one of the GTMetrix PRO subscriptions. Basic – free. Bronze – $14.95/month. Silver – $49.95 /month. Gold – $149.95 /month.
Dareboost
Dareboost is not just a speed test tool, it is an all-in-one tool to manage the speed of any given web page. This tool provides with a complete report on its performance and gives tips and best practices on how to improve speed divided into various categories, including Cache, SEO, Security, Data amount and more. All these features are available in one tool. Except that, this web page speed tool functions like all other speed test tools, but providing you with metrics directly related to UX. The report generated allows you to target your priorities and to resolve problems that slow down your website’s performance.
Price: Dareboost offers several pricing plans. Freelance – $22/month. Business – $57/month. Enterprise – $160/month.
WebpageTest
One more great option for those who want to test website load time is Webpage test.It is a free tool that can help you identify why your website is slow and help you fine tune it to be as fast as possible.The grading on Webpage Test is from F to A based on different performance tests such as Time to First Byte, compression, caching, effective use of CDN, etc. What’s more, it can be configured to use a wide variety of different locations and perform advanced testing, including multi-step transactions, video view, content blocking, etc or you can run a simple test. The report is divided into six sections – summary, details, performance review, content breakdown, domains, screenshots, image analysis, and request map. Since you’re free to use any browser, Webpagetest will also help you understand which browser is best suited to view your website and where changes should be made.
Price: Free.
Uptrends
Uptrends - free website speed tool lets users test a website through 35 global checkpoints. It gives you the page details element by element to assist you with finding problem page elements and show your page’s load progression using an easy to read waterfall report. Uptrends presents colorful results, splitting the report into two sections: a waterfall breakdown and domain groups. The domain groups shows a unique perspective as it categorizes the resources into separate sources: first-party, statistics, CDN, social, ads, uncategorized, first-party overall, and third party overall. In addition, if you want a well-designed and captivating website monitoring tool, give this one a go. The dashboard UI is amazing.
Price: Uptrends offers several pricing plans. Starter – $14.17/month. Premium – $40.67/month. Professional – $198.26/month. Business – $33.92/month. Enterprise – $61.37/month.
Bottom Line
Website speed and performance are the most important aspects of providing a great user experience, so it’s important to take the steps needed to ensure your site ranks high. We have mentioned the most common Magento speed test online tools to check the speed of your website.
