13 Free Tools to Test Website Speed

Regularly testing the speed of your website is a good way to catch bottlenecks and improve the experience of visitors.

Here is a list of free tools to test websites. There are both simple and advanced tools to test page speed, search engine optimization, and mobile browser performance. Measure your website or your competitor’s. Get actionable recommendations to improve your results. All of these tools have free plans.

Free Tools to Test Website Speed

Pingdom. Analyze the load speed of your website and learn how to make it faster. Pingdom lets you identify what’s fast, slow, too big, and the best practices you’re not following. See how your website conforms to performance best practices from Google PageSpeed Insights. Tests are saved so you can trace your performance over time. All tests are done with real web browsers, so results match the end-user experience. Basic tool is free. Premium version is $14.95 per month.

Pingdom

Pagelocity. Pagelocity is a web application for analyzing, optimizing, and monitoring web pages. Content audit offers insights about keywords, headings, links (internal, external, and nofollow), as well as alternative text for images. Maintain your web page optimization by knowing its composition (how many images, scripts, or style files it has). Get useful information about your markup: classes/IDs, tags, Google PageSpeed, and more. Get the Chrome extension to quickly analyze online pages.

Nibbler. Nibbler is a free tool for testing websites. Enter the address of any website and Nibbler will give you a report scoring the website from 1 to 10 in key areas, including accessibility, SEO, social media, and technology. Nibbler is free, but limited to three reports. Pro version is $60 per month.

GTmetrix. GTmetrix is a tool to easily determine the performance of your website. Get your site’s load speed along with actionable recommendations to deal with your bottlenecks. Schedule monitoring and set up alerts. Test from multiple regions and analyze your performance on mobile. Premium plan offers video playback. Service is free for up to three URLs. Premium plans start at $14.95 per month.

GTmetrix

YSlow. YSlow analyzes web pages and discovers why they are slow based on Yahoo’s 34 rules for high performance websites. YSlow’s web page analysis is based on the 23 rules that are testable. YSlow grades a web page, summarizes the components and statistics, offers suggestions, and provides tools for performance analysis.

PageScoring. This free tool provides webmasters with valuable information about the loading speed of their domain and website. This tool will check everything from your domain resolving speed to your download times.

mobiReady. mobiReady is a free testing tool for mobile web developers, designers, and marketers to evaluate a website’s mobile readiness using industry best practices and standards. The tests are based on W3C standards, as well as Yahoo’s YSlow and Google’s PageSpeed guidelines. Get analysis and recommendations to determine how well your site performs on mobile devices. Benchmark your web presence against your competitors’.

mobiReady

Varvy. Varvy is a collection of free tools to test SEO, speed, and mobile functionality of a website. Run the SEO tool to see how well a page follows the Google guidelines. Test your page speed optimization. And check a web page for mobile SEO issues. Each test page also has an assortment of help tips and guidelines for optimizing web page performance.

Dotcom-Monitor. Dotcom-Monitor’s speed test enables users to test their website from 20 locations worldwide. Once a test is complete, users can drill down into performance reports and a waterfall chart analysis. Users may also select which browser they’d like to test from — Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, and mobile browsers, including iPhone, iPad, and more. Trial edition is free for 30 days. Business plan starts at $5.99 per month.

Load Impact. Load Impact simulates traffic exactly how it would happen in real life. Run large-scale load tests with up to 1.2 million concurrent users. Generate load from up to 10 different locations simultaneously, and even add more locations upon request. Record an HTTP session and let the simulated users perform the same actions during the test. Configure your load tests to run in the middle of the night or once per week. Free plan offers 10 tests per month. Premium plans start at $119 per month.

Load Impact

PageSpeed Insights. Google’s PageSpeed Insights measures the performance of a page for mobile and desktop devices. It fetches the URL twice, once with a mobile user-agent and once with a desktop-user agent. The PageSpeed score ranges from 0 to 100 points. PageSpeed Insights is continually improved; the score will change with new rules or improved analysis.

WebPagetest. Originally developed by AOL for internal use, WebPagetest is an open source project that is now primarily developed and supported by Google. Run a free website speed test from multiple locations around the globe using real browsers (Internet Explorer and Chrome) and at real consumer connection speeds. Run simple tests or perform advanced testing including multi-step transactions, video capture, content blocking, and more. In exchange for running a testing location, partners get their logo associated with the location and a banner on the site. Hosting a test location is open to anyone who is interested.

Uptrends. Uptrends’ free website speed test lets users test a website through 35 global checkpoints. Check your web page and display the resolve, TCP connect, HTTPS handshake, send, wait, and receive times. Speed test is free. Premium service starts at $13.35 per month, for full-time monitoring.