In the last couple of years, Google has become very strict while considering the web pages to be indexed. There are several factors, depending on which Google pushes a web page to the first page in search results. Not only Google, this is the case with all major search engines.
The important factors responsible for higher or lower ranking of a web page are page loading time, scripts on that particular page, number and size of images, popups and the most important thing, the total page size.
You might not know every time which of the components is making your site slow or which component you do not need. To get some suggestions you may want to use some online tools. In this article, we will be discussing some popular tools for testing a website performance.
1. Pingdom
This online tool runs an in-depth scan of your web page and tells you exactly how much memory is being used by every single element like scripts, images, content, etc. It also tells you about the connect time to your server, connect and load time of each element, and the total number of elements.
2. GTmetrix
This tool is termed as the combination of two online services named as Google PageSpeed and Yahoo Yslow. The report of your webpage gives you every suggestion you might need to improve the performance and speed of your website. The report is a tabbed result where you can view an individual analysis by both Google PageSpeed and Yahoo Yslow tools. GTmetrix also gives you the ability to download the result as a pdf file.
3. Load Impact
This tool is useful for those webmasters who receive thousands of visitors at a time. It runs a scan on your webpage and tells you the impact caused on your webpage by a certain number of active users. In the free account, you can check only upto 50 users. For finding out the impact with a larger number of users, you will need to buy a premium membership.
4. SOASTA
SOASTA CloudTest platform is mainly designed for the developers of web and mobile based applications. This online tool tests web based applications on the basis of speed, performance and precision. SOASTA and New Relic have partnered to use their revolutionary products at one single destination.
New Relic’s application performance management solution has been integrated on SOASTA CloudTest platform to give users a great reason to try out their tool and make their application better, faster and more responsive.
5. WebSlug
Using this tool, you can compare the speed and performance of various websites. This tool gives a detailed report of your website in comparison to your competitor’s website. Using this tool, you can easily list out all those elements where your site needs improvement in order to be better than your competitor’s.
These tools are really effective. I used most of those. But the first one is the best I have ever found.
It’s so important for new blogger.I have learned more important how to write on my blog in this post.
Good article! You’ve raised good points. Let’s speak about Performance testing versus Load Testing. As an engineer for Neotys, editor of NeoLoad, I would like to share our point of view on Performance testing.
Today’s challenges are more related to anticipating server capacities to meet expected situations than doing theoretical testing. With the growing complexity of server components — Cache, Load Balancer, CDN, Google SPDY, Ajax, Push, and others —, performing raw load tests doesn’t help you ensure your application will work in production.
First, performance testing consists in doing tests close to real life : designing different virtual users according to different business cases (for example Buyer, Browser, ReturningBuyer), variabilizing functional items used for the tests (for example ref. of the article bought, color of the articles chosen), recording real transactions with real devices (for example, mobile devices), and applying different network conditions (for example people on mobile networks generate a different load on the server from cable networks due to latency, packet loss, and so on).
Performance testing is also a “monitoring” issue. Monitoring means checking how your server behaves under test, better analyzing and fixing issues, and identifying them before they appear (for example a RDBMS access queue can be used at 90%). It also means moving from technical monitoring to monitoring driven by business needs with Service Level Agreements (for example payment transactions should be done in less than 3 sec).
We entered in the Load Testing market in 2005. Over past years, we’ve seen a shift in customers’ expectations. NeoLoad, our performance testing tool, made this change. You can check it by yourself: http://www.neotys.com/product/download-neoload.html. I’ll be happy to get your feedback!