Test the speed of your website

In our blog on Maximum Website Loading Speed, we already tell you how to optimize your website. But how do you know if your website is loading fast or not? The first step to improving the speed of your website is to test the pages of your website. You need to figure out why it is that pages on your website are slow.

What will you test?

The question is: what should I test? A mistake often made is that only the home page of a website is tested. Any page of your website can rank in Google, and through any page, visitors can come to your website. Therefore, always test multiple pages. At least the most important pages of your website:

• Homepage
• Product page
• About us
• Blog Overview
• Contact page

You can also look in Google Analytics to see which web pages have a high “bounce rate. One reason for this may be that the page loads slowly and visitors immediately drop out.
There are several tests on the Internet to test your loading speed of your site or a page. Always run multiple tests at different times. A single test is never representative. To research properly, for example, you can test your web pages at different times every day for a week.

Uptrends

If you target the Dutch end user and host your website in the Netherlands then
Uptrends
is a must for testing your website. Unlike the other tools mentioned, this one works very quickly and also indicates points for improvement in a waterfall. In addition, uptime check, Route-trace and DNS reporting can also be made on this site.

Webpage test

Webpagetest
you can test from neighboring countries such as Belgium and England. Interesting when you have visitors from surrounding countries. Web page test provides an overview of the various components being loaded. This is in the form of a waterfall so you can see which parts take a long time to load. Because so many tests are run on it, you do often find yourself in the queue before your site can be tested. The nice thing, though, is that you can watch a video of your test, so you can also visually see how your content loads.

Pingdom Tools

Pingdom
is one of the most popular tools for testing the speed of your website. You can test website speed from various locations, including from Stockholm, America and Australia. Interesting in case you have a lot of international visitors to your website. Again, you can see in an overview in a waterfall at which points loading takes a long time and you can take action on this.

Google PageSpeed Insights

Google PageSpeed Insights
is Google’s (free) tool that lets you test how well your website is doing according to Google. Although it is not a real tool for measuring speed (the tool does not indicate how fast the website loads), Google PageSpeed Insights is great for seeing what improvements Google thinks should be made. Google PageSpeed Insights provides mobile and desktop recommendations. It’s pretty hard to get a high score, but at least it gives you insight into how Google looks at your website.

With these tips for checking your site, you can get the most out of your online performance. Also read our article on
Maximum loading speed for your website
How to optimize content, among other things. This is how we make you more successful with ‘SQR.NL’.