Aside from an educated guess, an accurate diagnosis behind a website’s performance is possible through a website speed test. You can easily gain useful insight into the speed quality of your website using a third-party speed test tool. Up to date, there are several tools available. For the purpose of this article, we enumerated the most commonly used tools below:

• Web Page Test
• PageSpeed Tools
• YSlow
• Pingdom Tools

How to Test Website Speed

To give you an overview, here’s a guide using one of the third-party tools (Web Page Test):

1. Go to Web Page Test.
2. Enter your Website URL in the specified field.
3. Select your Test Location and Browser used from the corresponding drop-down menus.
4. Click Start Test button to proceed.

Analysing Performance Results

Here are the things you have to consider when analysing perfomance results:

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• If First Byte is greater than one second, your server is slow. This is due to your website’s plugins and coding.
• If Requests are more than 100, the browser has to go through multiple connections before it can display your website. You can lessen the browser’s activity by displaying less content from other websites, combining CSS and JavaScript files, and enabling cache headers.
• If Bytes in is greater than 1,000 KB, the browser has to download heaps of files before your website displays. Consider compressing your website files.