20+ Best Website Speed Test Tools — How Fast is Your Site? Run a Free Site Speed Audit [2021]

Looking for a website speed test tool to help you run a free site speed audit? Look no further than this ultimate list of the best website speed test tools and resources out there.

These site speed test tools will help you to find out everything you need to know about your site’s performance.

You will also be able to generate detailed site speed reports and insights that matter to your business.

If your site has been lagging behind times, and you don’t really know what’s going on, you’re about to find out.

Let’s go!

3 Excellent Reasons Why You Must Improve Your Site Speed ASAP

Honestly, there are far more than 3 reasons.

In fact, I could’ve listed out a dozen, easily!

Because site speed is that important.

But, the 3 reasons mentioned below will be more than enough to convince you to pay attention to how fast your site loads.

# Good for the Users

Actually, it’s excellent for them.

Web users today are spoiled with an infinite supply of websites online, and they are not going to wait for your site to load.

In fact, if your page takes 3s+ to load, it’s too late to even say goodbye to them because they’re already long gone.

Ideally, you want your site to load under 1s, and if currently, it’s not, the free speed testing tools you’ll find below will tell you exactly why.

# Good for SEO

Site speed is a confirmed Google ranking factor. By having a fast website, you’ll have an important SEO lever working in your favor 24/7.

# Boost Important UX Factors

Google is all about providing the best user experience they can, and part of that experience is sending said users to fast-loading websites.

If your site is speedy, people won’t pogo stick; they’ll bounce less often; and they’ll record higher dwell time on average.

These are all metrics Google pays close attention to, and when they see you have excellent scores on all of them, they’ll reward you with higher rankings.

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7 Important Metrics You Need to Know About

Before we delve into our comprehensive list of best website speed testing tools, first we’ll briefly cover the important metrics you need to know about.

This is so you can actually understand what the site speed reports are telling you.

# Resources That Take Too Long to Load

Slow loading resources can be anything, from the plugins you use to images you upload, to fonts, JavaScript, and CSS files that slow down your site’s load time to a crawl.

# Time to First Byte and First Contentful Paint

Time to first byte (TFB) tells you your server’s response time ie., how long it takes for the server to notice and respond to a request to load a page.

First Contentful Paint (FCP) tells you when the first pixels of your page start to appear to the user.

Naturally, you want both metrics to be as low as possible.

# Cumulative Layout Shift

CML (Cumulative Layout Shift) is a metric that tells you how much your page shifts on its own without any input from the user.

It’s one of the Core Web Vitals that Google is going to push in May this year, and your goal as a webmaster is to have that number as close to zero as possible.

# Page Size, Load Time, and Number of Requests

Page size metric tells you how heavy your page is.

Load time is how long until it’s fully loaded.

And the number of requests tells you the number of requests sent to the server.

The more there are, the slower your site will load.

# HTTP Requests and Headers

HTTP requests metric shows you how clients communicate with your host’s server by sending information back and forth via a request and response sequence.

Every request will have to be resolved with a response code, and every additional request puts strain on your server leading to higher load times.

HTTP headers pass additional information with an HTTP request or response.

They’re very useful when you’re trying to debug different errors that might’ve happened with your WordPress website.

# CSS and JavaScript

If you have Javascript and/or CSS code blocking the rendering of your page, that’s going to significantly increase your page loading time.

Website speed testing tools can show you the code to blame, and then you can minify JavaScript and CSS, and also defer them from loading until other elements on the page are delivered first.

Note: WP Rocket is the best tool for caching and code minification. Read this WP Rocket review here!

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Best Website Speed Test Tools – Compared and Reviewed

22 site performance test tools seem like it’s a lot, and in a way it is.

But I wanted to make this post the best guide on the web for site speed testing tools, including both free and paid services.

#1. Pingdom

• Name – Pingdom
• Price – Free

Pingdom is an oldie but a goodie when it comes to website performance test services.

It’s a free tool that grades your site’s speed from 1 to 100, and then gives you recommendations (content size, response codes, request types, response codes…) on what to fix.

It also generates a detailed waterfall report based on the assets loading, check out the example below.

This one-by-one file loading information gives a clear-cut indication about the files/hosting/DNS whatever is weighing your site down.

Overall, it’s a solid, free service that will point you in the right direction in regard to the site speed problems you need to fix to achieve higher scores.

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#2. GTmetrix

• Name – GTmetrix
• Price – Free

GTmetrix gives you detailed information on your page speed, number of requests, load time, FCP, TFB, CML…

Contrary to Pingdom above, whose report is somewhat bare bones, this website speed testing tool is all you need to get a clear picture of what you need to improve.

You can start using GTmetrix immediately, without signing up. However, you only get one location (Vancouver, Canada) and one browser (Chrome, desktop) from which you can test your site’s performance.

By signing up for free, you can test with multiple locations and multiple browsers which will tell you how your site behaves to a global audience, and not just for Canadian web users.

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#3. Google PageSpeed Insights

• Name – Pagespeed Insights by Google
• Price – Free

Google PageSpeed Insights is one of the easiest tools to use on this list.

It works by scanning your website or web page and giving you a numerical score between 1 and 100.

The closer you are to 100 points, the faster your site is.

Reports are divided into mobile speed scores and desktop ones, and you get separate recommendations for both.

Speaking of recommendations, besides the regular stuff like page speed and page load time, you also get a report on how you’re doing in regard to the Core Web Vitals, which will be vital (pun intended) in the near future.

As a bonus, this tool is free and you don’t have to be logged in to your Google Search Console to use it.

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#4. Google Chrome DevTools – Powered by Lighthouse

• Name – Google Chrome DevTools – Google Chrome – your own browser 😉
• Price – Free

Google ChromeDev Tools is a free toolset built into the Chrome browser that lets you see a waterfall timeline of your page, with all the resources that are bulking up your page and causing slow load time.

Google ChromeDev Tools is free, and to access it simply type CTRL+Shift+J on Windows, or Cmd + Option + I if you’re on a Mac OS.

There are many tools you will find, for site performance tests we will discuss Lighthouse.

Lighthouse is an open-source, automated tool that can be used to test the quality of any website. The tests it provides are for performance, accessibility, SEO, and more.

Run Lighthouse in Chrome DevTools –

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#5. Google Analytics Site Speed

• Name – Google Analytics Site Speed
• Price – Free

Google Analytics (learn how to install it) is another free Google tool that can show you how fast your pages are to the end-users.

To access it, simply log into your Google Analytics dashboard, then go to —

Reports > Behavior > Site Speed.

The reports GA shows you are:

• Page Timings Report – here you can see how fast individual pages are on your site.
• Speed Suggestions Report – here you’ll get a bunch of tips on how to improve site speed.
• User Timings Report – here Google Analytics shows you how individual resources (images, videos, buttons) are performing, and which are bulky and slow to load.

Again, this website speed test tool is free to use, you only need a GA account, and it should be the first thing to check out when investigating page speed problems.

Why?

It’s because the data in Google Analytics comes directly from Google and they’ve gathered and measured it from real-world users.

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#6. Test My Site – Think with Google

• Name – Test My Site – Think with Google – Google Mobile Website Speed
• Price – Free

As the name suggests, this tool is all about measuring your site’s performance on mobile devices, from smartphones to androids, to everything in between.

As you input your site’s URL into the dedicated field, it’ll scan your site and give you an overall grade, and then as you scroll down the page you can see actionable advice on how to improve your scores.

Google Mobile Website Speed could be a very useful tool for you, especially if the majority of traffic hitting your site uses their mobile devices to access it.

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#7. WebPageTest

• Name – WebPageTest
• Price – Free

WebPageTest is an awesome and free website speed checker that showers you with a host of useful data, much more than most other tools on this list.

I’m impressed!

First, you see your site graded according to its performance in each area. See the image above.

Next, you can delve deeper into reporting and see exactly:

• Time to First Byte;
• What is the First Contentful Paint (plus other Core Web Vitals);
• Average Page Load Time;
• How heavy is your page;
• And more.

Finally, you can scroll to the bottom of the report to see the waterfall of 3 successive page loads this tool did.

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#8. KeyCDN

• Name – KeyCDN
• Price – Free

KeyCDN speed tester tool is another awesome addition to this list of free website speed checkers.

The report starts with a very basic overview of your site’s speed. You get a grade (in our case it was A), the time it took to load the page, page size, and the number of requests.

You can also pick from 10 different locations to test your site (we went from Frankfurt with this test).

As you scroll down KeyCDN speed tester shows you all possible areas of improvement, along with your site’s grade in each area.

As you can see, we got nearly all green (no wonder, as we host on Cloudways, and use WP Rocket, the best caching plugin for WordPress sites.

KeyCDN also offers a performance test tool to check the TTFB and Connection time. Quite useful when you are trying to optimize your servers and DNS.

Related: Check out our list of best CDN services for WordPress sites!

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#9, Measure by Web.dev

• Name – Measure by Web.dev
• Price – Free

Measure is a free tool that checks not only website speed and performance, but also SEO, accessibility (this is how usable the site is for handicapped persons), and other best practices.

It’s a good tool with comprehensive reporting, however, having tested it multiple times in a row, I’m starting to think it sometimes does not measure very accurately, at least with its “performance” report.

The web.dev tool, similar to PageSpeed Insights, uses Lighthouse to test the core web vitals.

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#10. Sucuri

• Name – Sucuri Load Time Tester
• Price – Free

Sucuri Load Time Tester is a very newbie-friendly tool that’s also dead simple to use and understand.

I say it because there isn’t a lot going on the page.

You input your page’s URL, it gets tested from different servers and locations, and you get your results.

Green is good, red is bad, and orange is decent but can be improved upon.

The most important thing to look for here is server location and TFB (time to first byte).

Server location is crucial because, if most of your traffic is for example, from India, then how fast your page loads from India will be of paramount importance to you.

And TFB is crucial because it’s the one metric that tells you the “true” speed of your site,

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#11. GeekFlare

• Name – GeekFlare – Website Audit Tool
• Price – Free

GeekFlare is a tool you can geek out on!

Just kidding:)

However, they do offer abundant reporting, considering you can test your site for free, and you don’t even need to sign up.

GeekFlare tells you how fast your page loads, time to first byte, first contentful paint, page size, whether your site is served over HTTP-2, and more.

Your page is also graded on a scale of 1-100, with 100 being the maximum score.

Below that initial, high-level overview of your site’s performance, you also get a host of tips on what you can improve upon.

We at Technumero have a sound site speed strategy in place, so we have almost nothing left to improve, but your situation will probably be vastly different.

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#12. Ubersuggest SEO Analyzer by Neil Patel

• Name – Ubersuggest SEO Analyzer by Neil Patel
• Price – Free

SEO Analyzer is a free tool offered by Neil Patel.

With it you can do a full site audit and uncover a whole host of problems that are weighing your site down.

A subset of these are site speed problems, and I find that SEO Analyzer gives more than decent reporting on what’s wrong with your slow website.

Things this tool shows you for free (for both mobile and desktop site versions) are:

• First contentful paint;
• Speed index;
• Time to first interactive;
• First meaningful paint;
• First CPU idle;
• Estimated input latency.

There’s a lot of value here, especially since you get an overview of all other site problems, not just those relating to site speed.

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#13. SEMrush Site Audit

• Name – SEMrush Site Audit
• Price – Free

SEMrush is another all-in-one SEO tool set that offers a free site audit feature for your site.

All you have to do is head on over here, and input your website URL. Then SEMrush will get to work and spit out all the SEO problems your site is facing.

To access the speed report click on the “Performance” tab

Once there, you’ll see all the site speed problems SEMrush found.

In our case, it’s negligible, but in your case, there will probably be more problems to look at.

SEMrush also gives you a Core Web Vitals report (currently in beta).

Again, to access it just click on the Core Web Vitals tab.

There you can see Time to first Byte, Cumulative Layout Shift, and Largest Contentful Paint graphs along with advice on how to improve those metrics.

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#14. DareBoost

• Name – Dareboost
• Price – Free

DareBoost is a free website speed test tool that takes your site and runs it through multiple locations across the globe from both desktop and mobile.

As you can see from the image above, their dashboard is simple and gives you a lot of actionable data points to work with.

The most important metrics to look at are those from the Core Web Vitals category + page load size and load speed.

Below that high-level report, there are tips on how to improve site speed, and these are ordered hierarchically, in order of importance and impact they have on your site’s performance.

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#15. Yellow Lab Tools

• Name – Yellow Lab Tools
• Price – Free

Yellow Lab Tools is a relatively new tool in the website performance monitoring arena.

But it’s a refreshing addition nonetheless.

Why?

Because of several reasons.

First, the tool is both free and simple to use.

Second, their dashboard is very intuitive and gives a very thorough report on everything that’s preventing your site from loading in <1s.

I mean, take a look.

The only thing that’s missing are guidelines on how to fix those problems. But, it’s not a deal-breaker as you can always Google it.

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#16. Uptime

• Name – Uptime
• Price – Freemium

Uptime is a website performance monitoring tool whose main service is uptime monitoring of your website, servers, and API’s.

That feature is premium, and honestly, more suitable for bigger websites.

But the free version of Uptime gives you a nice snapshot of your page speed issues and things you need to resolve.

Take a look:

Note: by clicking on one of those orange boxes, they expand to show you the exact resources that are slowing your page down.

This is very actionable data for you to work with.

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#17. SEO SiteCheckup

• Name – SEO SiteCheckup
• Price – Free

SEO SiteCheckup is a free SEO audit tool that will analyze your site and display everything right and wrong about it.

The problems are divided into categories, and you access them by clicking on the nav bar tabs at the top.

We’re interested in this tool’s website speed test, which can be accessed by clicking on the “Speed” tab.

We at Technumero got all green, but problems you’ll need to fix will be labeled in red.

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#18- Site 24×7

• Name – Site24x7
• Price – Free

Oftentimes, your site speed is affected by much more than just CSS, JavaScript, and HTML you’ve implemented on the front end.

In many cases, your cheap host could be to blame for atrocious page load times.

Site 24×7 speed testing tool is built to uncover those types of problems.

It works by:

• Providing an intuitive waterfall graph that tells you exactly what resources load on your webpage, when, and for how long.
• Evaluating server environment performance in regards to site or web page speed.

However, Site 24×7 Webpage Analyzer isn’t a standalone website speed testing tool.

You can’t use only this tool and get to the bottom of your speed-related problems.

But, it is a nice and robust addition to other performance-measuring tools on this list.

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#19. Uptrends

• Name – Uptrends
• Price – Free

Uptrends is a straightforward tool that lets you test your website’s performance from 10 worldly locations, and from either desktop or mobile devices.

For the desktop version, you can also choose between four browsers (Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer and PhantomJS,).

And you can set bandwidth throttling to test your site, and how behaves when it’s besieged with hordes of traffic.

Note: for the mobile test, you have limited options.

In fact, the only things you can change are bandwidth throttling and the type of mobile phone (iPhone, Android, Google Pixel…)

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#20. Dotcom-tools

• Name – Dotcom-tools
• Price – Freemium

Dotcom-tools offers a range of free network tools and one of them is a website speed test tool.

This speed test tool can test your site from up to 25 locations with a paid plan, however, with a free plan, you get to test your site from 3 locations out of 25 places around the world.

Apart from locations, the Speed test tool by dotcom-tools also let you select the browser and screen resolution of your choice.

The test results also are amazing, you get to know about Site Performance, Best Practices followed, and SEO report. based on the Lighthouse 6.0.

It checks your site at least twice and reports the page load time for both visits.

One should consider this for testing the performance of their website. It is a very good alternative to Uptrends, Uptime, and Dareboost.

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What About Varvy and YSlow?

Both Varvy and YSlow used to be excellent website speed testing tools.

However, they’re now severely outdated and not in line with the new site speed requirements for 2021 and beyond.

I suggest you keep to this list and not waste time with those performance testing tools.

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Premium Website Speed Testing Tools

We covered the free website speed testing tools. Now let’s briefly go over the premium ones, for you power users out there:)

#21. Sematext Synthetics

• Name – Sematext Synthetics
• Price – starts at 0.007/hr

Sematext Synthetics is a new synthetic monitoring tool that is making large headway on the market thanks to its affordability, intuitiveness, and a vast array of capabilities.

With it you can:

• Monitor website performance and API availability across multiple locations across the globe;
• Measure how your site performs on different browsers and devices;
• Identify bottlenecks with third-party scripts, plugins, and resources.

Sematext Synthetics is a premium tool that has it all, and if you’re willing to pay, you won’t need any other tool on this list.

There’s a free trial available and plans start at 0.007/hr.

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#22. Dotcom-Monitor

• Name – Dotcom-Monitor
• Price – starts at $19.95/mo

With Dotcom-Monitor, you can test your site speed from 25 different locations and the 7 most popular web browsers.

After the test is finished, your site will be graded based on its performance, specifically page load time, Core Web Vitals, and average server response time.

You’ll also be able to see how fast your site loads to a repeat visitor, meaning the one who already has your site’s files cached in their browsers.

That can give you an idea of how heavy your pages initially are, and how valuable caching plugin you have installed really is (note: we use and recommend WP Rocket, the best caching plugin for WordPress sites).

The performance test of Dotcom-Monitor also hooks up to Lighthouse so you’ll also get a detailed page speed score and report generated by that tool.

Dotcom-Monitor is a premium tool and the cheapest plan start at $19.95/mo.

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Final Words – Why Site Speed is Important…

Let’s recap why site speed is crucial for you in 2021 and going forward.

Website speed and performance are important because they affect the user either positively or negatively.

They lower or boost your SEO and Google rankings, and they can destroy your reputation with Google for good if your UX signals fall below a certain threshold, and stay there for a while.

So, if your site is slow right now, you must fix those issues ASAP, and the first step is to use one of the website speed test tools to see what it is exactly that’s weighing your site down.

Get the data first, and then act decisively!

Website Speed Test Tools FAQ