It is crucial for any company that wishes to maintain a competitive advantage on the internet while also creating a pleasant impression on its clients to have a quickly-loaded website.
Search engines such as Google reward websites that load quickly with higher rankings, resulting in a rise in sales. Due to the high volume of clients who visit a company’s website, when the site is too slow, the company’s sales may suffer.
Visitors have access to an extensive set of tools and alternatives when evaluating the page speed and overall performance of a website.
GTmetrix
The GTmetrix website speed test is a fantastic tool for evaluating the overall performance of website speed performance. It provides a comprehensive view of how quickly and responsively a website responds.
GTmetrix analyses your website and makes recommendations for improvements based on a wide range of parameters that it measures.
Our agency uses this tool in conjunction with the Google PageSpeed and Pingdom tools to assess which aspects of our websites need to be optimized. For example, it could involve optimizing images, removing CSS, or even replacing entire plugins altogether.
Using this tool, we will determine precisely where we need to concentrate our efforts to make the website as responsive as feasible and do your WordPress sites speed optimization.
In addition to testing the performance of your page, this application contains a host of advanced capabilities such as waterfall loading charts and video playing.
These additional capabilities provide you access to substantially more data and information than some of the other website speed performance tools available on the internet today.
Now that we understand what GTmetrix is and why it might be useful, let’s go through each feature in-depth and explain how to utilize the tool most efficiently.
How To Use GTmetrix?
It is not possible to download GTmetrix because it is a web-based platform. To access the tool, go to GTmetrix.
Input the URL of the web page to be evaluated. Click on the analysis button once the program has been loaded. The domain of your homepage or the domain of a specific page that you wish to test can be entered in the box below the text box.
You can also input the domain of a single blog post to assess the loading speed of a blog entry if you have blog posts that use a template, for example.
Aggregate Scores & Details
The performance scores will provide you with information about the general health of your website in terms of speed and performance.
Even if they do not point out particular issues with your site. Scoring above 80 in both tests, having a page fully loaded time of fewer than 3 seconds. Having a manageable page size (often less than 2 MB) and receiving few requests will indicate that your site is running well.
It’s normal to observe fewer numbers than those shown in this example, especially if this is your first time running a GTmetrix report and you’re just getting started with GTmetrix.
It is due to the fact your website is not normally optimized for speed and performance, which is something that the GTmetrix tool can help you with.
PageSpeed
PageSpeed delivers a performance metric for your website ranging from 0 to 100, as well as nearly 25 different suggestions for improvements. PageSpeed is calculated using Google Lighthouse, and with the help of this, you can calculate the data.
Specifically, the information is acquired based on laboratory data, which estimates the website’s performance in a controlled environment by employing a range of measures.
The information gathered from real-world field data helps identify bottlenecks in a website’s speed and the overall user experience it gives in the real world. Moreover, the information is based on very few metrics.
YSLOW
YSLOW is similar to PageSpeed. However, it is also a website speed testing tool that examines the loading performance of your website and provides up to 15 suggestions for improving your site’s loading speed so that you can work on them.
So when you run the test to check your website’s loading speed, the results will come, and there you’ll be given a grade for your recommendation, along with a subcategory and a priority the one’s which are a priority, you can see it under the “priority tab.”
So addressing the high-priority issues should be your top priority; following that, you should start focusing on the intermediate concerns and last the concerns with the least priority.
As I have mentioned already, the two tests, PageSPeed and YSLOW, have a high degree of connection. The gap is very small. Both will scan your website according to their respective algorithms to identify how to fix the website speed.
Both of them will make unique recommendations, providing you with a good range of areas to focus on when optimizing your website speed.
GTmetrix Waterfall Chart
And here is the most useful and arguably the most impactful feature of GTmetrix: the GTMetrix Waterfall Chart. For each piece of content that is available on your website, you can see how much time it will take to load in the waterfall chart.
If you are a beginner in this and just getting started, this chart will be overwhelming for you. However, you should be aware that each asset on your web page generates an HTTP request to the site’s server, which you should be prepared to handle.
You have to keep in mind that you have to look out for the ‘Request’ tab, which shows you all the assets that your web page contains and that need to be loaded by the browsers. Each asset on your website needs to be loaded in several diff steps. Each asset is identified via a DNS Lookup, connected, sent, waited for, and received.
When it comes to the GTmetrix speed measurement system, the Waterfall Chart is the most challenging part and is technically complex. And the main part of the relief is GTmetrix provides a thorough explanation of how to understand and grasp the Waterfall chart properly.
All of this information can be found in the Waterfall graph section of the site.
Timing
The page load time is defined as a single unit, meaning that a page is fully loaded when all assets have been loaded correctly and no extra download is necessary. More elements determine how quickly a page is loaded in the real world.
Typically, a person who visits the website is concerned about the amount of time it takes for the content to appear on a web page to load, and if the page loading speed is more, they will switch to another website, and your bounce rate will increase.
Even if something accessible on the page constitutes less than 50% of the total assets on the page, users believe the website to have loaded as soon as something viewable on the page becomes visible. As a result, the webpage appears to be loading faster than it is.
Additional information can be found on this page in the form of a score known as the RUM speed index. This score, according to GTmetrix, “is a page load performance metric that represents the rate at which the page was visibly populated.” “The lower the score, the more favorable the situation.”
Video
The video tab helps the visitors understand the page loading structure by recording a video of the page loading structure. The video speed can be decelerated four times with this to make troubleshooting simpler.
Aside from that, it can present a filmstrip view, which shows a frame-by-frame representation of the website speed and loading process.
Because of this feature, it is straightforward to establish how long it will take for the initial material to become visible and whether or not there is any unstyled content such as fonts and texts, etc.
How to Set up Automatic Monitoring and Alerts With GTmetrix
Another essential option included with your GTmetrix subscription is the ability to set up automatic performance monitoring on a per-application basis. The monitoring service is available with a free account; however, the features are severely limited, and the automated tests can only be set up from the Vancouver, Canada server; you cannot select any of the other test locations.
To enable monitoring, select the Monitor option from the drop-down menu at the top of the test results page. It will bring up a slide-out window to choose how your site will be monitored. The options are as follows:
In addition to sending you a digest of your results via email, GTmetrix also keeps a record of them in the History tab.
You will have access to additional capabilities such as monitoring from multiple test locations, hourly monitoring tests, and the ability to monitor new websites if you purchase a GTmetrix Professional subscription.
As soon as you turn on monitoring, you’ll be able to build custom alerts that will notify you when certain conditions are met, such as when your page load time exceeds a specified threshold or when your TTFB increases, among other things.
Configuration of these alerts can be accomplished by selecting the Configure Alerts button from the test results interface:
Setting up GTmetrix Plugin in WordPress
First, you must download and install the GTmetrix WordPress plugin from the official GTmetrix website.
Upon activation, the plugin will create a new menu item named ‘GTmetrix’ in your WordPress admin sidebar, which you can access by clicking on it. First, however, it is necessary to click on it to access the plugin’s setup page.
On this screen, you will be requested to input your GTmetrix account email address as well as your API key(s).
By registering for a free account, you will acquire the API keys. This free account will limit the number of requests it can make each day. If you only use it on a single website, on the other hand, you will almost definitely never run out of credits.
Create an account on GTmetrix’s website by simply visiting the site.
To access the GTmetrix API Details after creating an account, go to the top of the page and click on the ‘User settings’ link, which is located under the Account Settings section.
On the following screen, press the Generate API key button to get started. GTmetrix will instantly generate an API key for you to copy and paste into your application.
At this time, you should return to the ‘GTmetrix’ plugin settings page in your WordPress administration area. Then, continue by inputting your account’s email address and the API Key that you copied earlier in this process.
Remember to click on the ‘Save Changes‘ button to ensure that your modifications are saved.
Once you’ve installed the plugin, you can start using it to run your WordPress performance tests.
To begin, go to the GTmetrix » Tests page on the website. When you visit this page and click the ‘Test your FrontPage now’ button, you will be able to test the homepage of your website speed quickly.
In addition, you may check the performance of any page on your WordPress website using this plugin. Enter the URL of the page you want to test into the ‘Test performance of’ box.
For these customized tests, you may also provide a label and specify a geographic area to be tested in. To maximize your chances of success, you should choose sites that are the most closely related to your target audience.
Conclusion
A GTmetrix website speed test provides this in-depth examination of a website’s performance. Because GTmetrix is an all-in-one solution, you can save time and effort by not testing your site with many tools, compiling reports, and analyzing what adjustments need to be made.
It is one of the most valuable advantages of GTmetrix. Furthermore, following your experience with GTmetrix, you will no longer require any other website speed testing program.
Out of curiosity, what do you think are the advantages of GTmetrix when compared to PageSpeed Insights?