From 2021 to 2022, we went from 0 to 300 unique visitors per day in SEO. This result is the product of several factors, one of which is the technical performance of our site. Frequent auditing and testing of site performance is essential for three reasons:

1. Trying to understand Google's expectations
2. Obtaining technical insights
3. Check

This article is divided into two parts. First part, the tools offered for free by the search engine Google and second part, the other tools.

1. What tools are available free of charge from Google to test the performance of a website?

What I like about Google is that not only do they have great tools, but they are all free. So as a search engine, Google recognises the importance of having access to useful resources and technical recommendations for its content creators.

Here are the 3 most used Google tools to analyse your website.

1.1 Google Page Speed Insight

Easy to use, with customised optimisations just a click away.

1. Go to Google Page Speed Insight
2. Paste the url you wish to test into the search bar
3. Click on analyse
4. Find out the results (score out of 100) and personalized recommendations for the mobile and computer version of your page

1.2 Google Lighthouse

360° audit of a page of your website from a chrome extension or the DevTools inspector console (cmd +option+ I on mac).

⚠️ If you have other chrome extensions, they are likely to negatively impact the audit. It is therefore best to open a page in private browsing to measure the actual performance of your site.

Discover the Google Lighthouse tool

1.3 Test My Site

Less well known than the two previous tools, Test My Site is a tool that focuses on the mobile loading time metric of your website. At the end of your test, you will receive a detailed report with practical and actionable advice on how to improve your score.

Test your site on testmysite

Bonus: Google Search Console

Google Search Console also offers a performance report on the speed of your website. This report is based on your users and the loading time when they are on your website.

The data is therefore extracted from a real panel, which is its strength, but also its weakness. Because to get its "real-time" data you need (1) to have enough visitors on your pages for Google to analyse it, but also, the result may be slightly truncated because, (2) the connection speed of your users may play on this evaluation.

dURL speed result on Google Search Console

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2. Other websiteanalysis tools ?

There are many other tools available to audit your website performance. As there is a direct correlation between the performance (speed) of your website and your SEO results, most SEO tools include an audit of the technical performance of your website. This audit usually includes 4 KPIs

1. Loading speed
2. Technical accessibility of your content (robot txt/sitemap)
3. SEO structure
4. Legibility of your content (web accessibility)

This list is not exhaustive, but here are some of the most popular tools!

• Pingdom
• Semrush
• Ryte
• Ionos
• GtMetrix

Conclusion

You now have with you this diagnostic box of nearly 10 tools for testing the performance of your website pages. These tests are essential to find opportunities to get your site faster, more user-friendly and therefore better ranked by search engines.

If you are using Webflow as a CMS and you want to improve the loading speed of your Webflow website? Here is the checklist for a fast Webflow site.