Using the right tools to measure page load performance

Article originally by Bart Pluskota the founder of CDNfinder.

Google’s PageSpeed Insights presents data in a user friendly way, with useful tips about how you can speed up your website.

The whole point of implementing a content delivery network is to boost your website’s performance and attract new custom through an improved user experience. So it’s no good using a CDN that has below par performance or that doesn’t cope well with excessive traffic.

Luckily, there are many tools available for measuring website performance. One method of assessing how well your website is performing is to measure the speed at which the page loads from an end user’s perspective. There are many services available for measuring this, with many providing free services. Here is a list of some of the most popular free services:

Google PageSpeed Insights

As well as measuring page load performance, Google’s service gives tips and advice on how you can improve your load performance. Providing a score out of 100, advice includes tips such as eliminating render-blocking JavaScript and CSS or optimising/compressing images to save bytes of data during delivery. Tips are rated either green, amber or red, depending on the impact they will have on your page load times, with red rated tips providing the biggest speed increases. This service also measures the page load times of mobile sites, which is highly important as more and more people are accessing pages via mobile devices.

WebPageTest

This free service provides virtual page load test across different browsers, letting you test how your page loads in different browsers without having them installed on your system. This is great for testing cross-browser compatibility. In addition to this, it allows you to see how pages load in different locations around the world, with servers across North America, South America, Europe, Asia and Oceania available for testing.

Pingdom

This services tests a range of measurements, including ping, traceroute and DNS health. This is a great way to get an overall picture of how well your website is performing.

WebWait

By pulling an entire website into your browser, WebWait is able to provide an in depth measurement of the site’s performance, taking into account Ajax and JavaScript processing as well as image loading, all of which are often ignored by other performance measurement tools.

By using these free tools, you can build a comprehensive overview of how well your web page is loading in different locations around the world and through many different browsers. Using the tips provided and insights gained, you can create a high performance web page with a great user experience, encouraging more people to visit your site, improving your page hits and revenues.

See the original article at CDNfinder blog.

Bart Pluskota

“Bart Pluskota has gained well over 10 years of experience in the CDN industry. As an accomplished director of sales, he has kept at the forefront of technology trends in the internet and telecoms industry. With an unparalleled knowledge of CDNs and exclusive links with major providers, Bart is well placed to guide potential CDN customers through the difficult process of selecting their ideal CDN provider.”

Sincerely, CDNsun.