Why Test Website Performance?

- 2 minutes read - 401 words

  1. Enjoyment. I get excited and intrigued from reading website performance tests of various kinds.

  2. Civic duty. The performance of the web is generally a public interest issue.

  3. Someday… work will call for it. The skills involved in understanding web performance issues are transferrable and important skills

WebPageTest offers a premium web service on top of OSS. It is possible to setup a private instance and I am working towards that goal. I am a big fan of WebPageTest, so much so that I ran out of my 1000 runs well before my plan renewal:

What did I spend 1000 runs on?

I went on so many investigations. Questions that the tests helped answer or provided some kind of picture of a different style of waterfall.

There is so much more that each WPT test result offers for analysis other than just the visuals, but those are often the most compelling:

I wanted to see what my alma maters homepage looked like on desktop Chrome on a Cable connection. Pretty good, visually complete in approx 3.3 seconds.

Otago University website filmstrip

I wanted to see what the loading proces of the websites of the MLB, NFL, NHL and NBA all looked like visually. These major league websites have a lot of ads and trackers it seems

I wanted to see how my local city Government’s website performed under lower power connection conditions like Slow 3G. I am still experimenting to figure out how many could be affected by serious slowness at lower connection speeds: some initial tests had it taking over a minute to populate information.

I wanted to see how my personal Ko-Fi donation page performed. It performs very well, despite taking on a significant embed script from Ko-Fi. Kept everything else lean around it I guess!

I wanted to see how a selection of web performance products and services websites stacked up performance wise:

Speed Services Filmstrip

Services working on website speed seem to take speed seriously! Good sign.

I wanted to see what Hacker News performed like. 17Kb over total downloaded on a first hit, and then even less on repeat view. Lean website!

Hacker News Crux Data

Hacker News’s CrUX data is basically all green.

I will keep experimenting…

In a months time, when the runs arrive March 16. I love this service but not enough financial means to jump up to 5000 tests a month.

In the meantime I have some great free options for doing more investigations.