5 Free Tools to Help Improve Website Performance

Ryo Mac
Psynamic
Published in
5 min readAug 1, 2018

Do you want to increase your website’s speed? How about SEO? Do you want to ensure that it looks good on a mobile device? I’ve been looking for tools to do all of these things and more, and I wanted to share what I found here. These services will not simply provide you with an automatic solution, but they will certainly provide recommendations so that you will know exactly what problems your website is facing, and what steps you can take to solve them. As a web developer, this is an invaluable list. I decided not to rank these, so they are in no particular order.

Top 5 Tools

GTmetrix

GTmetrix is good for giving tips on performance optimizations. There’s concise info (and suggestions for improvements) on things like image sizes, file minifications, caching, etc. The UI is easy to understand and navigate. Everything contributing to the scores can be clicked on to see specific instances of everything measured, making it really easy to find the problems highlighted in the report.

Website Grader

Website Grader provides a report that actually looks like a 1-page infographic, which is really impressive. The report is split up into 4 sections (performance, mobile, SEO, and security), which is both convenient and incredibly visually appealing. Each individual score has a link to more information, and the bottom of the report gives recommendations on improvements to each section.

Nibbler

Nibbler is really interesting and impressive. It looks at how your website fairs in terms of many unique factors, including social media interest, online popularity (e.g., how many other websites link to it), server behaviour, how optimized the website is to be printed out on paper; along with other informative facts such as how old the domain is, and when the last update to the website was (which has ramifications for SEO).

W3C Validator

I just love the contrast of this to the other services. W3C isn’t beautiful, it’s not cool or trendy-looking — in fact, it’s a bit of an eyesore. But what they do is they give you objectively useful information on all of the errors and warnings in your website. This is therefore an excellent tool for web developers. The Validator is free because of community donations, and there is no paid service they are selling. That’s how you know there is no bias or even subjectivity in their results — just facts. Awesome.

Webpage Test

The UI isn’t gorgeous, and there’s a ton of stuff to look through (hence why it takes so long to run the test); but considering how much data you can get from this, it deserves a spot on the list. From waterfall graphs and content breakdowns to image analyses & interactive request maps, it’s pretty impressive how much information the creators of this services have been able to provide (though they did use some external APIs as well).

Honourable Mentions

Page Weight

Page Weight is all about images. The upside is that it cuts right to the chase (e.g., it will show your “worst performing image” and give a recommendation for improving it). The downside is that images are only one small aspect of your website’s performance. So the usefulness of this tool is really dependant on the type of website being measured. So if you don’t have many images, you should prioritize the other tools.

Website Speed Test

This website does have some useful information on it, but a lot of it is the same kinds of information you can get from the other tools listed. However, one unique feature of this tool that I found really interesting is that you can test how fast your website loads from different servers around the world. Most websites being developed won’t require such data, but I’m sure there are many companies and individuals that would find this information incredibly useful.

Contrasting Results & Test Validity

It couldn’t hurt to be a little bit skeptical of the validity of these tools, for a few reasons. For one thing, they rely on algorithms that may be flawed (because they are very complex/advanced). Also, many of these services have paid versions, which generally promise to either give you more in-depth analytics, or actually solve one or several of the problem areas that were discovered in the report. In other words, many tools are incentivized to give you negative scores, and then conveniently offer their services to fix the problem.

Furthermore, sometimes what is measured is not exactly what they say they measure (i.e., their algorithms aren’t necessarily flawed, and the services may not be misleading anyone on purpose); so the scores can’t easily be trusted. For example, Nibbler reported that my website was optimized for mobile phones, with a perfect score (10/10), while Website Grader gave the same exact website the lowest-possible score for mobile optimization (0/30). A third service, Woorank, gave a more nuanced breakdown of the same website, with a mix of passes and fails for mobile optimization (note: Woorank did not make the list because it’s not free).

Conclusion

The discrepancies described above do call into question the tools’ validity to some extent, but don’t let that dissuade you from using these tools altogether. These analytical tools are extremely valuable, because even if they don’t individually give you confidence in their results, you can always use multiple tools to fill in any gaps in your knowledge, and look for cross-platform consistencies. More information is always better than less.

On that note, let me know if you use any other free website-testing tools that you think should be on this list.

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