Acquiring a website is only the first step towards building a significant online presence and it requires constant planning and management to ensure that it remains highly productive. WordPress is one of the most popular website building frameworks and its characteristics like WordPress plugin development which enables people to easily extend the functionality of their interfaces attract all types of users. The open-source CMS facilitates the creation of fast loading websites but they need to be monitored constantly in order to maintain their speed and identify areas that need improvement. Owners must take all necessary steps to improve their interfaces and a list of some of the best tools to test WordPress website performance are being presented here for their benefit.
1. Pingdom
A very well-known and widely-used tool, Pingdom provides a free website speed testing service in addition to a range of paid plans which lets a user monitor various important metrics like uptime, transaction, and page speed. It enables the evaluation of the performance of numerous websites in real-time provides a facility to filter the analysis according to load order, file size, and load times.
Results can also be filtered according to the geographical location to measure the website performance in a chosen region. The service also uses visualization to present the result trends in the forms of graphs so that a user can easily comprehend how the visitor experience is being affected by the performance of the website. Pingdom helps owners get complete information about the device, browser, and platform used by the visitors to access their website so that they can make informed decisions to improve its functioning.
2. Google PageSpeed Insights
The world’s most powerful search engine is behind Google PageSpeed Insights which is another popular tool used for assessing the performance of WordPress websites on desktops as well as smart devices. The service provides a score in the range of 0 to 100 to web pages after ascertaining how successfully they have incorporated the best practices. It calculates the time taken to render above the fold content by the browser after a request as well as the time is taken to fully load a web page to finalize its score for the page in question.
It also provides suggestions related to the server configuration, HTML structure of a page, and the amount of JavaScript, CSS, and external elements like images used on it, that can be used to optimize a web page.
3. Dareboost
The next entry on this list of best tools to test WordPress website performance is Dareboost which is a paid service that does not require any installation. It provides comprehensive website analysis and quality auditing service that checks the data of a website against more than 100 best practices to spot issues along with prioritized solutions as part of a detailed evaluation report.
The service can also be used to conduct a comparative speed test with a competitor’s web page to assess if the website is faring better than its rival or not. A WordPress website constantly needs the integration of third-party services in order to add new features or functionalities and Dareboost constantly monitors the effect of these additions on the interface. The user is also free to set the testing conditions and set the screen resolution, bandwidth, latency, etc. besides enabling Adblock, HTTP header injection, or blacklists to recreate a specific user environment.
4.GTmetrix
Another very popular website performance analysis tool, GTmetrix is ideal for beginners as it is very easy to use. It provides the facility to schedule tests and users can set the frequency to daily, weekly, or monthly with premium users being able to set hourly frequency also. The service has 28 servers in 7 different geographical locations so that an owner can check the loading of his/her website from different regions. It also includes the analysis, scores, and recommendations of Google PageSpeed Insights and YSlow to provide a comprehensive evaluation of a website. A user can also set alerts based on various factors like page load time, total page size, Google PageSpeed Insights or YSlow results, etc. which will be activated when the page reaches a certain condition.
5. Geek Flare
The speed testing tool of Geek Flare lets users check the loading time of different web pages across various devices from multiple locations. The report generated by it contains information including fully loaded time on desktop and mobile, page size, number of requests, and content breakdown by type (image, script, CSS, HTML, etc.) and domain. It also provides the time to first byte (TTFB) data collected from all regions instantly. The service has some additional interesting tools that can be very beneficial for website owners like the website screenshot checker which helps the owner see how visitors are seeing the interface.
Conclusion
It is essential for owners to get a comprehensive idea about the functioning of their interface so that they can implement the requisite measures to improve it and all the above-mentioned tools to test WordPress website performance will help them immensely in fulfilling this objective.
