A fast loading website and optimal performance is an essential factor for any successful online presence. After Google revealed that they are taking site speed into consideration as a ranking criteria, people rushed to tools and tips to increase the performance of their websites.

Speed
Speed up your WordPress website with tools and plugins (Image Source: John Lee Maverick – Flickr.com – CC BY-ND 2.0)

Web Services to Monitor your Website Speed

But before optimizing your website, you need to analyze your website performance first and monitor what could potentially slow down your site. When this is done, you can use the data to optimize the performance of your website and avoid aspects that are slowing your site down. In this article we have collected some useful web services, tools and plugins that will help you to diagnose and analyze your site and allowing you to understand your website better.

Pingdom Website Speed Test

Pingdom
Pingdom Free Web Service (Image: Screenshot)

Pingdom is a free web service that allows you to monitor your site speed and uptime of your hosting, test the loading time of all website elements such as (HTML, images, Javascript, CSS, iFrames, etc.) and show you how long it takes to download these objects and how to reduce the time with some simple steps. The service includes statistics for uptime and response time of your server and can also send out alerts via SMS, email and more.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics
Google Analytics Free Web Service Tool (Image: Screenshot)

Google Analytics is a service provided by the search engine company itself. Google Analytics is not only ideal to analyze keywords, rankings and track visitors on your website, but provides website owners also with different statistics and information regarding the performance of their website.

If you are familiar with Google Analytics dashboard you can create a custom report and analyze amongst others the speed of your website. In this section Google gives you a rough idea about the average page load times of your site pages and also other load times such as “Average Redirection Time, Domain Lookup Time, Server Connection Time, Server Response Time and Page Download Time”.

GTmetrix – Website Speed and Performance Optimization

GTmetrix
GTmetrix Optimizing Tool – free & premium (Image: Screenshot)

GTmetrix is another tool to optimize your online presence as it can help you to develop a faster, more efficient and all-around improved website experience for your users. This service comes with two options “Free and Premium” and is based on some popular tools such as “Google Page Speed, Firefox Performance Add-ons, Yslow (Yahoo), Firebug and Net Export”.

Yahoo YSlow

YSlow
Web Page Analytics Tool YSlow (Image: Screenshot)

YSlow analyzes web pages and suggests ways to improve their performance based on a set of rules for high performance web pages. Yahoo!’s Exceptional Performance team has identified 34 rules that affect web page performance. YSlow’s web page analysis is based on the 23 of these 34 rules that are testable. Click each performance rule on their website to see the details and learn more about website performance any ways to improve it.

Searchmetrics Tool

searchmetrics
searchmetrics Speedometer Tool (Image: Screenshot)

The website speedometer of Searchmetrics shows the duration of a given website. This value can be used for showing how long a website takes to load and if it is better to optimize the website or change a (slow) ISP. Often the server environment is the main reason for poor website performance (e.g. low priced shared hosting) which can be easily solved by moving your website to a larger hosting plan or reliable hosting company for better website performance.

Neustar Website Performance

Neustar
Neustar Website Performance Tool (Image: Screenshot)

Neustar Website Performance includes two options to choose from: First Website Monitoring, “Externally monitor your website to see what customers see. Be alerted when your site is unavailable or pages load slowly.” and second Website Load Testing, “Test site traffic capacity, identify bottlenecks and be ready to launch new applications.”

Show Slow

Show Slow
Show Slow Open Source Web Service (Image: Screenshot)

Show Slow is an open source tool that helps monitor various website performance metrics over time. It captures the results of YSlow, Page Speed, WebPageTest and dynaTrace AJAX Edition rankings and graphs them to help you understand how various changes to your site affect its performance. This is ideal to gain insights regarding the performance of your website in order to take necessary steps and make your website load faster.

Load Impact

Load Impact
Load Impact To Check Website Loading Speed (Image: Screenshot)

Load Impact allows you to check out how many users can be handled at a time by your website without affecting its loading speed. Besides, its free account gives you the opportunity to check the loading impact of 50 simulated users.

WordPress Plugins to Monitor your Website Speed

GTmetrix for WordPress

GTmetrix Plugin
GTmetrix Plugin For WordPress (Image: Screenshot)

GTmetrix for WordPress can help you to develop a faster, more efficient, and all-around improved website experience for your users. With this free WordPress plugin you can monitor your website performance, run analyses or schedule reports on a regular basis.

Serverstate

Serverstate Plugin
Serverstate Plugin Monitoring Tool (Image: Screenshot)

Serverstate is a free monitoring service to optimize your WordPress website. It monitors the accessibility of websites and alerts in case of non availability of the target website.

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