If you are a webmaster, a blogger, a programmer or a website owner you want to optimize your site for optimum performance and for fast loading. Unfortunately, most of the sites are filled with bulky contents like big file sized animations, image files and big music files. So, it takes more time to load which results in more bounce rate.
Studies show that users leave a site if it hasn’t loaded in 4 seconds; so, keep your users happy and engaged by providing a fast performing website. A user with a slow internet connection never waste for a site if it takes too much time to load or spoiling his low bandwidth or download limit. Google search engine also supports faster performing sites in its results. So to get the ultimate win in the search engine ranking and to win more users the website content and design needs to be optimized for speed loading. To optimize a site one needs to know which items blocks the sites to perform well. There are some tools available which checks the sites and recommend essential changes needed for a website to perform it in it’s maximum speed.
Google’s Page Speed is an open-source tool from Google. It is available as an online app and also as a Chrome extension. Page Speed analyzes the content of a web page and generates suggestions based on the test to make the page faster.
YSlow is an open source tool from yahoo which analyzes web pages and suggests ways to improve the site’s performance based on a set of rules for high performance web pages. It can grades web page based on one of three predefined ruleset or a user-defined ruleset. The extensions and plugins are available for Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari, and also for mobile. The source code is also available. Yahoo’s 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. You can see the list from the Yslow website.
GTmetrix can help you develop a faster, more efficient, and all-around improved website experience for your users. GTmetrix uses Google Page Speed and Yahoo! YSlow to grade your site’s performance and provides actionable recommendations to fix these issues.
Pingdom tools offers some tools to check the website speed performance. To check a website enter a URL to test the load time of that page, analyze it and find bottlenecks.
Loads.in offers tools to check website load speed from different locations. It offers detailed information based on the test like waterfall charts and screenshots. One of the interesting thing that we noticed in this tool is it shows the screenshot of the page on each time as it loads. So we will get an actual view of the site and how it appears when it loads. you can check your website loading speed (with screenshots) in different locations and can compare the results.
You can run a free website speed test from multiple locations around the globe using real browsers (IE and Chrome) 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. Your results will provide rich diagnostic information including resource loading waterfall charts, Page Speed optimization checks and suggestions for improvements. You can easily select test locations (also from map), browsers etc.
This tool is highly useful if you want to compare your site with another one.
There are some other tools are also available. slowcop, is one of such a tool, but it was not accessible at the time of our testing.
If you are using wordpress to run the site, then the w3 total cache plugin is useful. It has a dashboard widget, it it enabled it checks the speed and shows the suggestions. What you think about these tools? Is it worth mentioning ?
