Website Testing Services: How Fast is Your Website? Measure It!

This article concentrates on the website load speed and its constant optimization that are necessary for a successful project monetization. In this article, you will find a list of tools for estimating productivity, speed and hardware of your computer.

CHECKING OF HARDWARE STRENGHT

For checking strength of hardware – download UnixBench from the official website. The given benchmark is designed for servers that are under control of similar to UNIX operational systems. It performs a number of tests and forms a report with a summative assessment.

INSTALLATION OF UNIXBENCH 5.1.3 ON UBUNTU/DEBIAN

WEB-SERVER TESTING

In order to test a web-server, one can use ApacheBench with an opened source code that is pre-installed in a standard distribution of Apache web-server. The given utility is designed for simple web-server load testing services. When the work is finished, ApacheBench forms a detailed report that allows estimating web-server productivity. It is also necessary to remember that the benchmark shouldn’t run on the same server, where the tested website is located. It can influence objectiveness of results.

APACHEBENCH RESULTS ANALYSIS

Test report that is formed based on test results include the following options:
• The amount of failed requests.
• The amount of processed requests per second.
• The average time spent on the processing of a request considering all the concurrent requests.
• Percentage of requests processed within a certain time.

LOAD TESTING SERVICE FOR GOURMETS

Apache JMeter – is a powerful tool for load testing services. It supports FTP, LDAP, SOAP, JMS, POP3, IMAP and TCP and allows creating test plans, what helps to get a fair view about web-server performance. JMeter has the graphical interface and can perfectly work from a console. JMeter supports various plug-ins from third party developers.

MEASURING WEBSITE LOAD SPEED

Now it’s high time to proceed to the list of useful tools for testing website load speed.

1. Whichloadsfaster – is a software testing service created for comparing the load speed of two websites. There are two modes of page load: parallel and sequential. As well, one can set the sequence of pages that should be compared against each other by means of menu item “Race”.
2. GTmetrix – is a software testing service for determining the load speed, YSlow and Google Page Speed are used for the assessment. Correspondingly, users will have an access to a detailed statistics on options that influence load time. The free version of the tool allows storing of 20 reports.
3. YSlow – is the utility that is also available out of GTmetrix service. It can be downloaded for different browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera) and its source code is available on GitHub.
4. Google Page Speed is also available as a separate extension for Chrome, Firefox.

For conclusion, it’s necessary to mention that one of the most important factors influencing website load speed is fast and reliable hosting. Make right conclusions and stay lucky!