Website performance is one of the most important factors that contribute to your business success nowadays. A KissMetrics infographic illustrates it quite nicely, explaining how every extra second of loading loses you customers. By the time you reach 3 seconds, 40% of prospective buyers will have already left, and 64% of those, who remain, might not shop here again. The good news is that even a small business can ensure a good website performance by using a great hosting. You’ll also need to monitor the site constantly to make sure it delivers the best experience to your customers.
4 Tools to Use for Website Performance Monitoring
1. Google PageSpeed Insights
In essence, Google PageSpeed Insights is another website speed testing tool, but it offers a greater insight into the performance of website’s elements. The tool will analyze page load distribution and highlight the areas that need to be optimized.
Every business should use this website performance optimization tool because it’s made by Google and for Google. As it’s the most popular search engine (about 90% of people use it), you’ll need to optimize your pages for it specifically.
2. GTmetrix
GTmetrix is a fantastic tool for testing website loading speed and overall performance. It offers a complete breakdown of the speed analysis, so you can determine where exactly the problem is. It also offers suggestions on how to fix it. The report history is preserved, so you can observe your website’s performance over time.
Most importantly, GTmetrix enables you to test website’s loading speed from different locations. This is very important for assessing the performance of your web hosting. You can get up-to-date information on overall host servers’ speed from professional reviews, like the one for GoDaddy. But if you target international clients, you should verify the performance for each individual country.
This tool also allows setting up monitored alerts. This means that you can be notified on any drop in performance right away and deal with it before it loses you prospective customers.
3. Sitespeed.io
Sitespeed.io is an open source and completely free tool for measuring and monitoring website performance. In fact, it’s a set of tools with various features that enable you to assess your website’s every page.
You can also use it for making your own performance tools. Browsertime from Sitespeed.io is great for providing detailed timing metrics.
4. Pingdom
Today, Pingdom is the King of business website performance tools. It tracks every step of the path from the visitor’s browser sending out a request to the server to the page actually loading on their screen. It will monitor your website’s uptime as well as loading speed. Therefore, it will also make a good tool for tracking your web hosting’s efficiency over time.
Pingdom analysis covers all types of content and it offers tips on how to improve the optimization of each. The tool also offers a Share Results feature that enables you to send the data directly to your web host or any other person you want to help with optimization. Pingdom offers a collection of monitoring tools that will track different aspects of your website’s performance and notify you of any problems immediately.
