The Best Website Speed ​​Test Tool & How to Speed ​​Up Your Page

How To Optimize Website Speed

Running a speed test is the first part of your website optimization journey.

Once you have your metrics, you need to know how to interpret them and what to do to correct them.

In the Metrics Summary section of your Website Speed ​​Report, you’ll see the top metrics we’ll be focusing on to speed up your website:

In addition, you can use the request waterfall to see how long requests are taking and how it affects these metrics.

How To Speed Up First Contentful Paint (FCP)

Let’s start by making your website appear earlier to your visitors. We’ll look at First Contentful Paint first.

What Is First Contentful Paint?

First Contentful Paint measures how quickly a page’s content first appears after your visitor navigates to that page.

It is important that your most important content is displayed quickly so that your visitors do not leave your website. The faster a user leaves your site, the faster Google will know that the site experience might be poor.

But how do you know exactly what is causing your website to load slowly?

How do you find out which server problems are slowing down your website? let’s find out

Why Is My First Contentful Paint Taking So Long?

Your FCP can be affected by server connection speed, server requirements, render blocking resources and more.

It sounds like a lot, but there’s an easy way to see exactly what’s slowing down your FCP — the request waterfall.

This useful tool shows what requests are being made from your website and when each request begins and ends.

For example, in this screenshot we see first a request for the HTML document and then two requests to load style sheets referenced in the document.

Screenshot showing debug data for the First Contentful Paint metric in DebugBear, October 2022

Why does the First Contentful Paint happen after 0.6 seconds? We can break down what’s happening on the page to understand this.

Understanding What Happens Before A First Contentful Paint

Before the first content can be loaded on your website, your user’s browser must first connect to your server and retrieve the content.

If this process takes a long time, it will take a long time for your user to see your website.

Your goal is to know what’s going on before your site starts loading, so you can pinpoint problems and speed up the experience.

Page Load Part 1: The browser creates a server connection

Before a website is requested from a server for the first time, your visitor’s browser must establish a network connection to that server.

This is usually done in three steps:

The browser executes these three steps one after the other. Each step requires a round trip from your visitor’s browser to your website’s server.

In this case, it takes about 251 milliseconds to establish the server connection.

DebugBear screenshot showing the network round trips used to establish a server connection, October 2022

Page Load Part 2: The browser requests the HTML document (time to first byte happens here)

Once the server connection is established, your visitor’s browser can request the HTML code containing your website’s content. This is known as an HTTP request.

In this case, the HTTP request takes 102 milliseconds. This duration includes both the time spent on the network round trip and the time spent waiting for the server to generate a response.

After 251 milliseconds to connect and 102 milliseconds to send the HTTP request, your visitor’s browser can finally start downloading the HTML response.

This milestone is called Time to First Byte (TTFB). In this case, this happens after a total of 353 milliseconds.

After the server response is ready, your visitor’s browser will spend some time downloading the HTML code. In this case, the response is quite small and the download only takes another 10 milliseconds.

Screenshot of DebugBear showing the different components of an HTTP request, October 2022

Page Load Part 3: Your website loads additional render blocking resources

Browsers do not render or display pages immediately after loading the document. Instead, there are usually additional render-blocking resources.

Most pages would look bad without visual styling, so CSS style sheets are loaded before a page begins rendering.

The 2 additional style sheets in this website speed test example take 137 milliseconds to load.

Note that these requests do not require a new server connection. As before, the CSS files are loaded from the same domain and can continue to use the existing connection.

DebugBear screenshot showing additional renderblocker resources being loaded after the HTML document, October 2022

Page Load Part 4: The browser renders the page

Once all the necessary resources have been loaded, your visitor’s browser can start rendering the page. However, this work also requires some processing time—in this case, 66 milliseconds. This is indicated by the orange CPU task marker in the waterfall view.

DebugBear screenshot showing the steps from loading the HTML document to rendering the web page, October 2022

We now understand why FCP happens after 632 milliseconds:

The other processing work involves small jobs like running inline scripts or parsing the HTML and CSS code after downloading. You can see this activity as small gray lines just below the rendering filmstrip.

How To Optimize First Contentful Paint (FCP)

Now that you understand what causes your website to render, you can start thinking about how to optimize it.

Now that the first parts of your website are loading faster, it’s time to focus on making the full website load faster.

How Speed Up Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) With DebugBear’s Recommendations

There are many ways to speed up your LCP.

To make it easy, DebugBear gives us great next steps in its Recommendations section.

Let’s take a look at some examples of the recommendations and learn how to speed up the LCP of this website.

Recommendation 1: Initiate LCP Image Requests From The HTML Document

If the largest piece of content on your page is an image, your best bet is to ensure that the URL is included directly in the original HTML document. This will help him start loading as soon as possible.

However, this best practice is not always used, and sometimes it takes a long time for the browser to realize that it needs to download the main image.

The following example uses JavaScript to add the largest piece of content, which is an image, to the page. Therefore, the browser must download and run a 200-kilobyte script before recognizing the image and beginning the download.

Screenshot of DebugBear showing a sequential request chain leading to an image request, October 2022

Solution: Depending on the website, there are two possible solutions.

Solution 1: If you are using JavaScript to lazyload a large image, optimize the image size and remove the lazy-loading script or replace it with the modern loading=”lazy” attribute that does not require JavaScript.

Solution 2: In other cases, server-side rendering would avoid having to download the JavaScript app before the page can be rendered. However, this can sometimes be complex to implement.

Recommendation 2: Ensure LCP Images Are Loaded With High Priority

After loading a page’s HTML code, your visitors’ browsers may find that a variety of additional resources such as style sheets may need to be loaded in addition to your main image.

The goal here is to ensure your larger main image loads to meet Google’s requirement for Largest Contentful Paint.

Other resources, like third-party analysis scripts, are not as important as your main image.

Additionally, most of the images referenced in your website’s HTML are below the fold once the page has been rendered. Some may be completely hidden in nested header navigation.

For this reason, browsers initially set the priority of all image requests to Low. Once the page has been rendered, the browser figures out which images are important and changes the priority. You can see an example of this in the screenshot below, as indicated by the asterisk in the priority column.

DebugBear screenshot showing an LCP image loading with low initial priority, October 2022

The waterfall shows that the browser knew about the image early on, but did not start downloading it, as indicated by the gray bar.

Solution: To solve this, you can use a new browser feature called priority alerts. If you add the attribute fetchpriority=”high” to an img element, the browser starts loading the image from the beginning.

Recommendation 3: Don’t Hide Page Content Using CSS

Sometimes you’re looking at a request waterfall and all the rendering-blocking resources have loaded, but still no page content is showing. What’s happening?

A/B testing tools often hide page content until test variations have been applied to content elements on the page. In these cases, the browser rendered the page, but all content is transparent.

What can you do if you can’t remove the A/B testing tool?

Solution: Check if you can configure the tool to only hide content affected by A/B testing. Alternatively, you can check if there is a way to make the A/B testing tool load faster.

DebugBear screenshot showing a rendering filmstrip hiding content from an A/B testing tool, October 2022

Monitor Your Site Speed With DebugBear

Do you want to continuously test your website? Try our paid monitoring tool with a 14-day free trial.

This lets you verify that your performance tweaks are working and alerts you to any slowdowns in your site’s performance.

Screenshot showing website speed trends for a website in DebugBear, October 2022

The opinions expressed in this article are those of Sponsor.

What is the best day to launch a website?

Tuesday is one of the best days to launch your website as it is likely that your potential customers are surfing online and are not yet engrossed in so much work that they don’t have time to check out your website.

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What are the two key ways of testing a website?

Performance Test – Run to verify server response time and throughput under various load conditions. Stress Testing – This is the simplest form of testing, performed to understand how the system will behave under a specific load.

What are the two test methods? These testing methods are typically performed in order and include: Unit testing. integration test. system tests.

What are 3 testing strategies?

For the testing process, develop an approach for continuous development.

• Various RCM maintenance strategies. …
• Software testing | accessibility test. …
• Software testing | Scenario Tests. …
• Software testing | penetration testing. …
• Software testing | database testing.

What are the 3 stages of testing our programs?

Testing your program is essential for any software development. Throughout the software development lifecycle, there are three levels of software testing: functional, integration, and end-to-end.

What are the three types of tests?

There are three common types of exams: written exams, oral exams and physical ability exams. Let’s take a look at the type of tasks you need to complete in each test type.

What is the best testing model?

V model. The V model is considered superior to the waterfall model. In this model, the development and test execution activities are carried out side by side in the downhill and uphill modes. Also, testing starts at the unit level and extends to the integration of the entire system.

What are the 3 models to test? 5 types of software testing models

• waterfall model.
• V model.
• Agile model.
• spiral model.
• Iterative Model.

Which model is best describe software testing requirements?

The waterfall model is a well-known model that is widely used in the software testing industry. As the name suggests, this process begins from a larger source and subsequent stages fall under it. Different steps. Each step or phase has its purpose and functionality.

Which type of model is used for identifying software requirements?

Requirements modeling in software engineering identifies the requirements that a software application or system must meet in order to solve the business problem. Requirements are divided into functional (what the system must do) and non-functional (constraints within which the system must function).

What is V & V model in software testing?

The V-model is a kind of SDLC model in which the process is executed sequentially in V-shape. It is also referred to as the verification and validation model. It is based on assigning a test phase to each corresponding development stage. Development of each step directly related to the testing phase.

What are the 4 types of testing?

There are four main testing phases that must be completed before a program can be released for use: unit testing, integration testing, system testing, and acceptance testing.

What are the two main types of testing?

Although there are different test types in practice, the two main categories are functional and non-functional test types.

What are the 3 classifications of testing?

Let’s explore some of the most common test types: Accessibility tests. acceptance test. Black Box Testing.

Is JMeter a Java application?

The Apache JMeter, popularly known as JMeter, is open source software. The software is a 100% pure Java application designed to test functional behavior and measure performance.

Is JMeter a Java profiler? The Java Kit Profiler attaches to your JMeter and gives you insight into the resources being used at a given load. Also tells you the number of running threads and daemon threads. Heap memory and non-heap memory can both be calculated using the same tool.

What language is used in JMeter?

Is JMeter written in Java?

JMeter is written in Java, so all JMeter units – like sampler, cache, listener, result – are described in the associated Java classes.

Which language is used in JMeter?

Groovy language is used as scripting language for JMeter. When it comes to enhancing the functionality of JMeter, Groovy has proven to be a powerful yet lightweight language in terms of performance.

Do we need to learn Java for JMeter?

Requirements. Before proceeding with this tutorial, you should have a basic understanding of the Java programming language. Since you will be using jMeter to perform all types of tests (regression, function, load, performance, etc.)

Which language is required for JMeter?

Groovy language is used as scripting language for JMeter. When it comes to enhancing the functionality of JMeter, Groovy has proven to be a powerful yet lightweight language in terms of performance.

Is Java used in JMeter?

JMeter, also known as “Apache JMeter”, is an open source, 100% Java-based application with a graphical interface. It is designed to analyze and measure the performance and load function behavior of web applications and a variety of services.

What is JMeter performance testing?

JMeter performance testing is the process of testing the performance of a web application using JMeter. As an open-source, Java-based software, JMeter can also be used for functional testing and load testing.

What is JMeter and how does it work? Jmeter simulates groups of users sending requests to a server or network, and then returns statistics to a user via visual charts. Apache Jmeter’s GUI is similar to a browser. However, Jmeter cannot render HTML pages or the JavaScript found in pages the way a browser would.

What is JMeter in simple words?

jMeter is an open source testing software. It is a 100% pure Java application for load and performance testing. jMeter is designed to cover different categories of testing like load testing, functional testing, performance testing, regression testing, etc. and requires JDK 5 or higher.

What is the meaning of JMeter?

JMeter is a software that can perform load testing, performance-oriented business (functional) testing, regression testing, etc. for different protocols or technologies. Stefano Mazzocchi from the Apache Software Foundation was the original developer of JMeter.

What is JMeter testing and how it works?

At a basic level, JMeter simulates visitors to your application or service by allowing users to compose and send HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) requests to the server. The server response data is then collected and the statistical data is presented visually to the users in the form of charts and reports.

What is JMeter tool used for?

What is JMeter? Apache JMeter is an open source Java application designed to test functional behavior and measure software performance. Originally designed for testing web apps, it has since been expanded to include other testing-related features.

Is JMeter an automation tool?

Page – JMeter. There are a number of automated testing tools on the market to test application functionality in real time. We use the Apache JMeter automation tool to load test and measure website performance. In addition, we also offer performance, stress and scalability.

Which tool is better JMeter and LoadRunner?

In addition to making elements easier to configure, JMeter does not require adding beginning or ending transaction elements, which LoadRunner does. In LoadRunner, arranging scripts takes more time, resources, and is more complex because of the different agents to manage.

Which tool is better than JMeter? Micro Focus Loadrunner is a widely used load testing tool. It is one of the best alternatives to JMeter that offers an easy-to-use monitoring and analysis interface with colorful charts and graphs. Features: Supports continuous testing.

Is JMeter the best performance testing tool?

JMeter is a high-performance tool that can perform load and performance tests on various products regardless of the server or protocol. Be it HTTP or HTTPS web services, databases, FTP, LDAP, MOM (Message-Oriented Middleware) to NoSQL (MongoDB) and JMS.

Why JMeter is best for performance testing?

JMeter for performance testing helps test both static and dynamic resources, helps detect concurrent users on the site, and provides a variety of graphical analytics for performance testing. JMeter performance testing includes load testing and web application stress testing.

Which is better JMeter vs LoadRunner?

JMeter performance is lower compared to LoadRunner. Small bugs and threats can be identified with this tool, but it is inefficient to detect threats in large applications. The LoadRunner is more efficient and faster in detecting the bus present in the application compared to the JMeter software.