Why do you need to test your WordPress site performance? Well, you probably already know this, things like site speed are becoming very important nowadays, and may even be more important in the future.

But how can you figure out accurately how fast your website loads to know where it stands? It’s easy – by using free website speed testing tools.

All of these tools allow you to test your WordPress site’s performance with ease – usually, it’s as easy as pasting in your website’s URL and letting the tool work its magic.

Here are my picks of the best free website speed testing tools you can utilize to test your WordPress site and pinpoint issues that might cause your website to be slow.

Google PageSpeed Insights

As you can see from the title, PageSpeed Insights is one of Google’s product. Next to the score (split into desktop and mobile) and the useful instructions on what to do to improve your page loading time, you can also draw a bottom line on what Google loves to see on a website. Which things it wants to be enhanced on a website to rank good in the search engine results.

You can start a test by entering your website’s page URL on the home page and click on the “Analyze” button. Since this test will scan on several aspects of your page, it can take slightly more time to complete:

This tool does not have a lot of detailed information, like other tools, but it’s a good starting point, which covers all the key aspects of page speed optimization. It lists the steps that will improve your website the most:

Your objective, according to Google, should be to attain a minimum score of 90 or higher on both the desktop and mobile versions of the test. However, it’s essential to keep in mind that this is a measure of what Google thinks. Consequently, from time to time there will always be someone denouncing PageSpeed Insights. Generally, because this tool doesn’t actually grade a website based upon speed and seems to prioritize performance on top of user experience – an allegation Google has confessed does have some validity.

The fact is you can have a sluggish website that scores higher when tested with PageSpeed Insights than a fast loading website. But in reality, your users a lot more concerned regarding how quickly your website loads than whether you load jQuery in the site’s header or footer.

Thus, should you avoid utilizing PageSpeed Insights? Hardly! Just don’t go after a perfect score. Instead, use the tool to identify and fix problem areas, and afterward test website speed with a tool that actually tests speed, such as Pingdom or GTmetrix.

 

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Pingdom Tools

The second option I’ll be looking for is Pingdom Tools which is probably the most popular WordPress site speed test tool. This tool accesses your website pages from a particular location and returns details about how quickly they loaded.

This method allows you to test your website’s loading speed. Plus, Pingdom rates your website depending on several metrics. For instance, it displays how many requests were required, how many redirects were performed, and precisely how your website’s speed compares to others.

To conduct a test, just enter your website’s URL into the particular field on the main page, then select the location you would like to use and click “Start Test”. You might be put in a queue, according to how many people are currently utilizing the tool, but in my experience, it usually takes less than a minute regarding the test to start. Once the test is complete, the page will reload, and you’ll be able to see your results:

You may ignore the score. What you need to focus on is the actual time required to load the web page. If the time is excruciatingly slow, pay attention to the number of HTTPS requests and page size, don’t forget to take notes too. Because largely website speed optimization practices will strive to reduce those two things.

Below that, Pingdom will give you a list of what your website is doing well (or poorly). If you click the down arrow, you’ll be able to see more specific information:

The next section outlines the content size and number of requests on the page. This data will start leading you towards diagnosing specific problem areas on your WordPress site:

There is virtually a good quantity of data here you can employ as a benchmark of what you do. Nevertheless, if your website serves a worldwide audience and visitors use various types of browsers or devices to locate your site, then you might need deeper insights.

 

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GTmetrix

Like Pingdom, GTmetrix is another free speed-checking tool that can be incredibly useful. It works much the same way as Pingdom, but it also provides more in-depth metrics and even offers optimization ideas depending on your results.

You can start a test by entering your website’s page URL on the home page and click on the “Analyze” button. Since this test is a little more extensive, it might take slightly more time to complete. While it’s being carried out, you can see how many websites are forward of you in the queue:

When the test has concluded, you’ll get accessibility to a lot of data. You’ll see how quickly your website loads, as well as other data, including the overall size:

And then below that, you can use the tabs to excavate information in more detail. Just like Pingdom, you can expand any of the suggestions to see more specific information. And the “What’s this mean?” button can be helpful if you are confused by the meaning of any of those recommendations:

To get access to all the detailed information, you’ll need to register for an account. Though using the free version might suffice when trying to make a gut decision about whether your WordPress site’s speed is suffering or not, you can’t actually use this data to inform your optimization efforts as is.

With the upgrade, you can add a number of customizations to your report, including drilling down by location, browsers, and experimenting with connection speeds too:

GTmetrix results get high rank for convenience and completeness. If you’re only going to use one testing tool, GTmetrix might be your best choice.

Note: GTmetrix calculates ‘page load time’ slightly different from Pingdom. For that reason, it’s normal that your website seems to load ‘slower’ in GTmetrix than it does in Pingdom.

 

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WebPageTest

WebPageTest is an open-source website speed platform formerly developed by AOL and then taken over by Google along with many additional partners (also including WordPress). As an open-source platform, anyone can freely see the code on GitHub, download it, and even host their own instance of the testing platform.

WebPageTest evaluates website speed by utilizing real consumer connection speeds. The outcomes demonstrate how your website will perform for a user employing an average connection speed. Consequently, you can expect your site to test one or two ticks more slowly on WebPageTest than in Pingdom or GTmetrix. Consider the results as representing “real world” performance rather than the “ideal environment” results that you obtain from Pingdom or GTmetrix.

Pingdom and GTmetrix inform you how fast your website can load. While WebPageTest tells you how fast your website can genuinely load for real consumers.

The simple test provides you the option to select between a desktop or one of a few mobile device browser options:

You can likewise see whether the loading speed has increased or decreased at the time of a second visit (because of caching).

When you set up a test using “Advanced Settings”, you can change these settings:

• Simulate a slow connection (eg. to mimic a user on 3G network)
• Change how many tests will run
• Choose which browser and device type to use for testing
• Enable/Disable JavaScript
• …configure a whole lot more

Dig deeper and you’ll see a number of options for enabling Google speed tests and reports:

Here you’ll allow having access to Google Chrome DevTools, Chrome Trace, and Google Lighthouse Audit.

Lighthouse is a developer’s tool you can run from a command line or use inside of Chrome DevTools. It conducts a page audit and tells you in case there are any performance errors. As shown by Michiel Heijmans, Lightspeed audits generally give you much slower loading times since various locations, devices, and server conditions are pitted against each other. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, just beware that the data might be a little excessive.

One other test configuration you need to pay attention to is the comparison tool:

This enables you to be able to compare your WordPress site’s performance with others.

To show you what the results look like, I’ll do a “Simple Testing”. By default, WebPageTest runs the test 3x to get more accurate data (Pingdom and GTmetrix only run it once).

Once the test finishes, you’ll be presented with a ton of data:

Note: In case you want to understand what all this means, Moz has a great post explaining all the data.

The breakdown of loading time is quite complex, which is why it’s essential to know the distinction between the First Contentful Paint versus a fully-loaded website.

As you scroll the page down, you’ll see a number of waterfall analyses presenting which files and scripts are inducing slower loading times. You’ll also possess an easy-to-follow recap of which content contributed the most requests and bytes:

Based on the complexity of the settings and the results, I would say this is a good and helpful tool for WordPress developers and possibly less so for other WordPress users.

Fun fact, WebPageTest also powers Think With Google’s website speed test tool. It’s a good job to make WebPageTest’s data more accessible to casual users, so this can be a good one to use in case you indeed felt overwhelmed by WebPageTest.

If you didn’t pick it up from the name, this website speed test tool specifically focuses on testing your website’s performance for mobile users.

All you need to do is enter your website’s URL. Then, Google will tell you how long your site took to load using a mobile device and simulating a 3G connection:

You can then click the “Get My Free Report” button to get some personalized tips on how to improve your website’s mobile version speed and make it more mobile-friendly.

 

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Load Impact

Load Impact is unlike any other website speed test tool on this list. What this tool does is measure server performance while multiple virtual users browse your website concurrently.

This tool tests by actually creating 25 concurrent (bot) users, and sending them over to your website to see how the site performs under load. The test lasts approximately five minutes.

Purpose of this tool is designed to help you answer the question: Can my website’s server handle a load of multiple concurrent users without slowing down? It’s absolutely a great tool you can use to ensure that the server hosting your website isn’t overloaded.

As you can see, running a test is quite simple. Just type in your site URL then click on the “Run Free Test” button and let the tool get to work:

After a few minutes, when the test is complete, you’ll get a nice summary + chart:

At first glance, it would seem complicated, but you can actually read that chart pretty easily. Basically, all that matters is this:

You want the green line – representing your load time – to be as flat as possible. If it goes up, that means the performance of your website may still be improved.

 

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Dotcom-Tools Website Speed Test

Dotcom-Tools isn’t one you typically find on website speed test lists, which is a shame since this free tool provides a good amount of insight that you usually won’t get from other tools.

It works by loading a web page from 25 different locations worldwide. The test provides a snapshot of performance metrics from each location including load speed, a waterfall chart, and a summary of any errors found during the testing process.

To start, you only need to enter your site URL into the required field on the home page:

But before you start the website speed test, scroll down and consider the following:

This is where your Google Analytics will come in handy.

• Browser Test – If your visitors use merely a couple of browsers, you can narrow your test down to assure speed is optimized for their experience.
• Location Test – The same applies to the geographical location of your visitors. If your website doesn’t serve a global audience, it would be beneficial to choose the regions where you receive most of the traffic.

Start your test once you have all your settings configured to your liking. It will last for a few minutes until the process is complete, based on how many locations you chose.

Once the test has completed, your results will appear like this:

The first tab of results will display:

• The average load time for the first visit across all locations.
• The load time for the first visit in each location.
• The average load time for the second visit (cached) across all locations.
• The load time for the second visit (cached) in each location.
• A list of error responses from the server.

If you click on the “Waterfall” button for any of these, you can drill down further into the performance report:

This will tell you which files, scripts, and tools are causing most of your website slowdowns.

Another great feature of this tool is that it includes PageSpeed Insights from Google:

This way you can do both your website’s speed and performance assessments for desktop and mobile, as well as receive an optimizations list from the same tool. In case you want to find out insights from Google and a “score” that tells you how good the performance is, you can switch over to that tab for confirmation.

 

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Uptrends Website Speed Test

Uptrends is a simple website speed test tool producing a timed waterfall chart of website loading speed from any one of more than 35 different test locations. In case you would like to test website performance from multiple locations, you’ll need to rerun the test manually from each location.

To start, just enter your site URL into the form, then select the test location you want and click on the “Start” button:

It doesn’t take much time, and when the test is done, you’ll receive a results table that looks like this:

There is actually nothing in the test results that aren’t provided by the other speed testing tools like Pingdom, GTmetrix, WebPageTest, and Dotcom-Monitor. However, with over 35 test locations available, in case you need to test performance from a specific location that isn’t covered by other services, check the list of available locations to see if Uptrends offers a test location closer to the location of your audience.

 

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Testing website performance is the first step which is the key to success in improving the speed of your WordPress site. The next step is to do something about it.

Review the test results and find out what actions you can take to speed up your WordPress site. Then figure out how to implement the improvements you’ve identified.

The good news, to do so you can read my speed optimization best practices.

Keep in mind that the ultimate goal is not just to get the highest score on a website speed test, but more than that, which is to provide the best possible user experience.

Need any help? Don’t hesitate to send me a question in the comments below!