[This post is part of the Ultimate Guide to Launching a WordPress-Powered Blog series.]
You may have experienced a lot of changes and updates to your blog throughout this entire series and at some point (or many points) you may have wondered what the actual benefit of all of these things might actually be.
Well, there are definitely some easy ways to find out! In fact, you’ll want to not only bookmark these but also use a number of them to get different perspectives.
In fact, it’s a good practice to do some tests after you do anything significant to your blog, especially as it relates to your WordPress Theme, any WordPress Plugins, any 3rd party scripts, any hosting/server/dns changes, and more!
Here are 10+ sites and web services/apps that can help you test your blog’s speed, the new caching systems you have in place, and any other optimization and/or changes that you’ve made to your blog.
1. Firebug + Yahoo! YSlow
Love me some Firebug and Yahoo! YSlow plugin. Definitely check those out!
2. Firebug + Google Page Speed
Make sure to get the Google Page Speed add-on too!
3. Firebug + Hammerhead
Hammerhead is a simple add-on that shows the load time of a website. Easy.
4. Pingdom Tools
Pingdom’s Toolset is amazing. I use this all the time.
5. Load Impact
This one is a personal favorite as it provides a stress-test to see if your new server or hosting provider can handle a huge surge of traffic. Check it out here. As you can see by my graph above a “flat line” means your server is amazing and the load tests aren’t even close to overloading the system.
6. Web Page Test
I standard test that’s comprehensive and yummy. Check it out here.
7. Gomez Instant Test Pro
This service is free although you have to fill out a bunch of information. You can quickly insert some “bogus” info and get the test done.
8. Redbot
Redbot is simple and easy to use. You’ll need a bit more native understanding to execute on some of their suggestions though.
9. Cache Test
This manual test is one way to not only “test” your system but learn more about caching in general.
10. Compression Check
See if you’ve got compression turned on to speed up your site!
11. Compression GZIP Check
Another simple test to check compression and GZIP.
Hope those help and can provide you with enough firepower to test out your sites and blog! Let me know if I’m missing one that you use!
Finally, looking for some more tools to use? Check out these two posts:
- 5 Sites That Analyze and Test Web Hosting Services and Providers
- 13 More Tools for Testing the Performance of Your Blog
[This post is part of the Ultimate Guide to Launching a WordPress-Powered Blog series.]
Hey John, I’ve done some of these already. But I’m thrilled that there are more and I now have a one-stop-shop listing of them all. Bravo, my brother!
sure thing joe!
Loads.in is kind of fun.
great site too!
I find this to be way off in terms of speed compared to other tools.
i’ve found it mixed as well. i’ve found some sites that do really well and then some sites (like mine) where the results are mixed.
Okay at least I am not crazy!
Hey John,
Just wanted to say thanks for all your excellent posts. I recently launched my own blog using the standard theme and followed through many of the tutorials found in this site. I then did another for a client of mine and today I’m on my third installation of the theme for a pastor. The tutorials have sure saved me a LOT of time. Thanks for the value your adding to the blogging community.
Tracy
http://www.maztek.com/blog
thanks so much tracy! glad you could get it all running! (and a client…!)
I’ll be using a few of these. Didn’t know anything like this existed. Thanks for sharing them with us. I’m learning so much here at tentlbogger.com
tent “l” bogger!
Awesome stuff John! I don’t know if I understand ALL of it, but I can definitely utilize most of these tools! Thanks again!
at some point you will… you’re growing in your blogging skills…1
Ok…so my blog comes up as not compressed.
So what’s the next step?
you using any caching systems?
Yeah. wp-cache
have you tried wp-super-cache? whats’ your hosting? if you can (and want) w3 total cache does compression.
John, that’s exactly what I needed. I didn’t know these sites you mentioned, so I’ll have to check all of them. It’ll be a busy weekend for me
Thanks very much!
sure thing cris!
One that’s kinda fun is http://whichloadsfaster.com/
I tested your against that “other” problogging site and guessed which loaded faster?
teehee!
i got this… http://cl.ly/6Jxd
My site loaded in 7.4 seconds…is that ok?
wordpress.com is fast but you lose a lot of benefits of going self-hosted.
This might be depressing for you, but I don’t have anything set up on my site…and it loads pretty fast.
Look at this: http://whichloadsfaster.com/?l=www.bigb94.wordpress.com&r=www.tentblogger.com
You have a lot of caching and performance plugins on your site, and I have nothing. Is it because I use wordpress.com that makes it fast?
what do you mean?
http://cl.ly/6LIe
In my face! haha… I guess it was that site. But when you switch to self-hosted, do you really lose that much speed?
you can if you choose a terrible hosting provider.
Thanks John for the post.
I tested our church website and 65% faster.
I would be exploring more on these websites and check the speed of our website.
Cheers – PJ
sure thing prajeeth!
make sure to grab a gravatar: http://tentblogger.com/gravatar/
Just tested three of my sites using the google’s page tester. What is a good score? I tested your site and I got a score of 80/100, while one of my sites got a score of 74/100 and the other two sites got scores of 72/100.
I am sitting at a 92 right now. I would say 85 and above is what you should aim for. Proper caching and server setup and 90 is pretty easy. AT that point its all optimization.
i agree with matthew here. even this site could be optimized more! some of the tests are “off” though because they require that you change some of the test settings to pull in correct data… but i’m not crazy when it comes to the point system.
it’s quite obvious when blogs are killing it in terms of speed and some of the “top” blogs out there have terrible ratings in these tests… but who cares!
try to focus on each section of the report and see if you can optimize individually.
Thank you so much for making this site! It has really opened my eyes to everything that needs to go into making a good blog. Cheers!
sure thing kevin!
Thanks for putting together a comprehensive list of tools. The all do well to help the web become a better place if we’d all only take the advice they provide.
Now, I’m a bit biased, but I’d like to throw PageLabs in the ring. PageLabs does what some of these sites do in terms of performance, but our tool can measure an entire website as well as content spanning pages like scripts and images. We also have a proxy service that speeds sites up 3 to 4x in most cases using aggressive caching and distributing content via our global CDN.
Take a look at http://www.pagelabs.com – give our free speed test a try.
I know it’s a plug, but we’re trying to help make the web a better place one site at a time.
thanks tyler.
This is a comprehensive list, can I also suggest to take a look at http://loadzen.com (full disclosure: I’m the founder). The site offers cloud based web load tests and has a a strong focus on removing the complexity from ceating meaningful load tests. The main feature being a chrome plugin that will effetively record your whole teting session (including Ajax), then allow you to ‘mix’ your recorded journeys into a meaningful simulation of your real (or expected) traffic.
We’re new on the block so just want to put our hat in the ring
Thanks,
Martin