Testing website performance is an important part of website development and maintenance. A site speed test can help developers identify specific assets or resources that are causing their websites to perform slowly.
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When automobile manufacturers develop a new model of a car, it may accelerate quickly and drive smoothly on paper, but the manufacturer can't know how well the car actually runs until a test driver takes it out on the track. Similarly, how a site performs in a local testing environment is not always a good indication of how it will perform in the wider Internet, which spans across a variety of network conditions and in various locations.
Website speed tests aim to simulate real-world conditions and provide data on how well a website actually performs. A website speed test should let developers know not just how fast their site or application is, but also which elements on the page are causing slowdowns.
Websites that perform poorly can frustrate users, driving them away. Slow site performance negatively impacts search rankings (or SEO), conversion rates, and the overall user experience.
Cloudflare offers a free site speed test tool. Additionally, we offer free CDN services for boosting website performance and reducing latency.
A number of online providers also offer website speed tests, and typically all that's necessary to start the test is to paste the URL into the provided field.
The basic Cloudflare speed test measures the following:
Not all speed test providers will break down site speed using the same performance metrics. Other performance metrics include:
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