5 Tools to Measure the Performance of your Website

https://youtu.be/RDE6Bblsmhg

We start by measuring We need to start by measuring. When talking about performance you need to start by identifying the problem. Finding what's wrong with your site is the first step to improving it.

This is why measurements are so important when you want to improve the speed of your website. If you don't have metrics to start from you don't even have a measure of your success, you can't simply trust feelings like "the site seems faster".

Why is measuring so important? Every time I found myself working on the performance of a site without having the right metrics, I always found myself literally groping in the dark, starting to make small changes here and there, without knowing exactly where to put my hands.

I therefore learned the hard way that you always have to start with measurements.

When you start measuring two things immediately happen

You start working at the root of the problem

You notice any regression immediately

By measuring every single change step you can immediately realize whether the situation has improved or worsened.

What tools do we have at our disposal to obtain these measurements? Choosing the right tool is very difficult. There are many options and each of them offers something more or something less than the others. In this article we look specifically at 5 of them:

GOOGLE PAGESPEED INSIGHTS For a long time, Google PageSpeed ​​Insights has played a dominant role in measurement tools and owes its popularity to three fundamental characteristics:

returns a simple score from 1 to 100 that is very easy to understand

provides you with some tips to improve the situation and try to get as close as possible to the maximum score

TEST MY SITE WITH GOOGLE More recently published tool that returns a result very similar to the previous one, but more focused on mobile. This tool generates a free report and, very interestingly, provides a comparison with the situation of your competitors.

PINGDOM SPEED TEST Pingdom is one of the most popular website speed measurement tools. This tool provides a very technical analysis of your site speed. Also included in the report is your Google PageSpeed ​​Insights score, a waterfall graph of all network requests, and page size.

WEBPAGE TEST This is certainly the tool preferred by developers as the analysis provided is decidedly very technical and therefore not accessible to all types of users. The very useful aspect of this tool is that you can test on real devices and you can launch your test in different geographical locations. This means that neither the connection nor the browser nor the device are simulated, but there is an actual real device somewhere in the world that will test your site.

SPEED The last tool (not least) that I want to point out is SPEED, created by Host. With this tool you can scan your site and follow advice to improve its performance. One of the strengths of SPEED is precisely the coaching part that provides you with a score (from 0 to 100) and a series of advice on what you can actually do in a practical way to improve this score in terms of Accessibility, Performance and Best Practices. We are very active on the development of this tool and have recently released important new features such as continuous and automatic monitoring of your sites.

If you want to try it, you can access the tool via the speed.host.it link, register for free and enter all the sites for which you want to start monitoring performance.

We have reached the end of this episode dedicated to the main tools for measuring website performance. Don't forget to subscribe to the Host YouTube Channel and activate the bell to be notified when we publish new content. Thanks and see you in the next video!