How do I test my mobile website speed?

All companies need to be proactive with their mobile site's speed optimisation. Your website's visibility, SEO, attraction and conversion depends on it. Do you know how to test and optimise it? Have a look at these popular tools.

Pingdom

This easy speed test tool gives you a score for your website's load time. Users just have to enter their URL and choose between 4 different locations (Melbourne, Australia; New York, State of New York; the United States; and Stockholm, Sweden) depending on where their website is hosted. What data can we obtain from this tool?

• Performance grade: the score the tool gives for the load speed of the analysed website.
• Load time: shows the seconds that the website takes to load and a comparison (in percentage) regarding the rest of analysed websites.
• Page size: the tool shows the total page weight.

It also generates a performance grade for the elements analysed and shows the errors that make the web load slowly, from higher to lower importance.

GT Metrix

This is a complete tool that gives insight on how well your website loads and creates reports from different web browsers (Chrome and Firefox) and countries. There are three essential rulesets for this tool that are relevant for website optimisation, both for desktop and for mobiles, although you will need a premium account for mobile.

• Page load time: it shows the average page load time. Currently, an optimum load time is between 2 and 3 seconds.
• Total page size: this detail shows the website size, which should not exceed 1 MB in weight. Images and videos are the elements that most affect page weight, so optimising them should be a priority.
• Requests: these are alerts that report errors and the reasons for slow page loading time.

PageSpeed Insights

This tool was developed by Google and is the simplest of the three. When you enter the URL, it automatically shows the website load time score from 0 to 100 for desktop and mobile. To obtain the speed score, PageSpeed Insights uses two metrics:

• FCP (first contentful paint): registers the moment in which users obtain visual responses to the pages.
• DCL (DOM content loaded): measures the moment the content is loaded and analyses the HTML documents.

As well as the score, the tool evaluates how well a page follows common performance best practices for desktop and mobile with a view to optimising the website. These recommendations are given in order of priority.