Website Speed and Performance Optimisation

Speed benchmarking services help you test the performance of your website pages. They are a vital tool when optimising your website as their reports will tell you the size of your web pages, the time it takes pages to load, and the total number of requests.

The great thing about these services is that they will show you exactly what is slowing down your website, whether it be images, a particular piece of Javascript, or the ping time between your server and their test centre.

Reports also show you exactly what you need to do to rectify an issue. If you follow their recommendations, your pages will load faster. This ensures a good experience for your visitors, will increase conversions, and it will improve your ranking in search engines.

* Unless otherwise stated, all services listed on this page are free to use.

Recommended Optimisation Services

The following services are highly respected by large companies, website developers, and internet marketers. I recommend using one or more of these services primarily to test the performance of your website as some services may highlight problems that others do not.

More Great Optimisation Services

A host of other optimisation services can be found online. Below is a collection of other useful services that you can use to test the speed and performance of your website pages.

	Google PageSpeed Insights What better way to optimise your website that to get advice from the largest search engine on the internet :) Google’s PageSpeed Insights service will give you a score out of 100 for mobiles and desktops. It will inform you which things you passed, which things you should consider fixing, and which things they recommend fixing immediately.
	GTmetrix A great tool that analyses and then grades a specific URL. The service will break down why you were given a particular PageSpeed or YSlow rating. It will also give you advice on what you need to do to correct those issues. If you create an account with GTmetrix, you can monitor three URLs and save up to twenty reports. Their premium plans start from only $14.95 per month.
	Pingdom Website Speed Test Pingdom’s website speed test provides a great analysis of your website speed and highlights what is slowing down your website pages. It highlights ways to improve loading times and provides an analysis of load time, size, and requests.
	Sucuri Load Time Tester Sucuri is best known for their security products and services, however they also provide a free test that shows you how long it takes to connect to your site and for one page to fully load. One of the most interesting things it highlights is the “time to first byte”. They define this as how long it took for the content to be sent back to browser to start processing the page. Whereas many speed testing services process a report based upon the performance from one data centre, Sucrur’s load time tester will test a page against over a dozen servers around the world. This will give you a more accurate picture of your website speed.
	Web Page Test Web Page Test might not boast the most interesting website design on the internet, but it does provide you with some useful information. It provides a lot of interesting reports and charts about a URL. It also grades your website on factors such as first byte time, keep-alive enabled, compress transfer, compress images, cache static content, and effective use of a content delivery network. You will undoubtedly love the waterfall, performance review, and content breakdown reports, that Web Page Test provides.
	YSlow YSlow is available as an extension for major browsers such as FireFox, Chrome, Safari, and Opera. Once installed, it will help you analyse web pages and highlight why they are slow. All reports are based on Yahoo!’s rules for performance websites. The tool will grade each page, summarise the page’s components, and display statistics for each page.

	DareBoost DareBoost will review a URL and give it a score out of 100. The report will highlight issues, things that can be improved, and successes. The report that is generated looks great and a lot of the data is displayed in graphs to help you digest the information better. Pro plans are available from $34 per month that provide website monitoring and an unlimited number of reports.
	KeyCDN’s Website Speed Test The content delivery network KeyCDN have a useful website speed test that allows you to test a URL at one of ten locations across the world. The report will show you which files are slowing down your web pages.
	SpeedCurve An interesting service that continuously monitors your website. It will show what your website looks like on different devices and resolutions, how quickly your website renders, and whether your content is optimised correctly. Video and filmstrips highlight the rendering process. Prices start from $0.01 per check with a minimum spend of $20 per month.
	Yellow Lab Tools A great little free tool that tests your website on desktops, tablets, and mobile phones. The report will give a URL a score out of 100. Criteria for your score includes page weight, requests, DOM complexity, DOM manipulations, scroll bottlenecks, bad Javascript, jQuery, CSS complexity, bad CSS, and server configuration.