Using GTmetrix For Website Performance Testing & Monitoring

When it comes to speed and performance audit, with GTmetrix, you can easily and quickly find out how fast your website loads. Eventually, this tool allows you to see how your website performs, reveal why it’s slow, and discover optimization opportunities. Join thousands of people and companies around the world committed to making the web consistently fast.

Google is now factoring in Core Web Vitals as part of their search ranking algorithm. A very poor-performing website may not fare well in search results and can impact your revenue if fewer people are finding you. Not forgetting, your website’s performance can make or break you. Fortunately, GTmetrix tells you how fast your website performs.

It also helps you discover opportunities for improvement. We know you understand the correlation between SERP visibility, website traffic, and conversions, and we know you see the importance of adapting your website to meet Google’s quality criteria before it could hurt you in the SERPs. The great news is that Google has equipped all of us with the right tools.

Tools that we’ll need in preparation for the algorithm to hit this year and onward. In terms of your overall website page experience, a SERP like Google has already made a few announcements that are in place and some are still coming — the fact is that they always promise to give a few months’ notice before the new changes actually go live.

What’s more, during the ultimate transitions, it has also supplied us with the tools we need in the meantime. In this guide, you are going to learn more about a few of them as well as the simple steps to use GTmetrix for your overall website testing.

What Is GTMetrix?

GTMetrix is part of a large free online web tools inventory that analyzes your webpage’s general score in terms of speed and performance using Google Page Speed and Yslow. It offers an awesome website optimization tool that can help you determine how fast your page loads. As well as what you need to do to fix it.

All you need to do is just plug your website URL into the search bar and click “Analyze.” Yes, of course, it’ll take a few seconds to bring up your results. But, eventually, you’ll get a ton of information just from running this free analysis. And you can see your PageSpeed Score, from a Yslow score to a fully loaded time.

In addition, it also tells you how “heavy” your website is and the average requests. And you can even scroll down to get even more detailed information. So to speak, it not only gives you recommendations about how to improve your page speed but also tells you what priority to give each recommended fix. Thus, it’s a worthwhile tool for website performance.

Generally speaking, we can clearly mention that GTMetrix is one of the best free online web tools that we have found using more and more often. Particularly, in order to analyze and get the Web Tech Experts detailed website performance reports. As such, page speed and page experience should be among the top optimizations to consider.

Why You Should Use GTMetrix For Website Speed Performance

Your users’ experience in terms of navigating your site should be a great reason. Users have many options when it comes to consuming content on the internet, and a slow-performing website will frustrate your users, sending them elsewhere. A faster and more responsive website will keep them more engaged and focused on your content, rather than waiting for a load.

Another reason is SEO. Google already uses page speed in its ranking algorithm and plans to incorporate Page Experience in its ranking algorithm as well, through the Web Vitals Initiative too. This means, that faster-loading sites with a good user experience may rank higher in search engine results. Most developers and marketers are always looking to optimize their sites.

GTMetrix is there to rescue you. Significantly, this comes after Google announced its updates on new speed algorithms in January 2018. According to the blog post announcement, the update would add mobile speed to its search engine’s list of ranking factors. And because of this update, your site’s page load speed will impact your rankings on both desktop and mobile.

Just as importantly, pages that load slowly — whether on mobile or desktop — contribute to high bounce rates people won’t sit around and wait for a slow page to load. They’ll just go elsewhere.

From this data, as shown in the figure above, we can surmise that page load times impact both aspects of website optimization. Namely: the site traffic and the site conversion rate. Whereby, you — or your developer — can use the information here to reduce page load speed. In that case, increasing your SEO rankings while reducing your bounce rate.

Website Page Experience Becomes A Ranking Factor On Google

According to Google, Website Page Experience is “a set of signals that measure how users perceive the experience of interacting with a web page.” It’s comprised of a range of factors, and each feeds into and compounds the others to influence Google’s interpretation of page experience as a whole — a set of signals that measure how users perceive your website.

In particular, the experience of interacting with a web page beyond its pure information value, both on mobile and desktop devices. It includes its ultimate Core Web Vitals, which is a set of metrics that measure real-world user experience. For things like the overall loading performance, interactivity, and visual stability of the page.

In addition, it also includes existing Search signals: mobile-friendliness, HTTPS, intrusive interstitial guidelines, and much more… And, while a great website page experience is important, Google still seeks to rank pages with the best information overall, even if the page experience is subpar. Great page experience doesn’t override having great page content.

Related Resource: SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Tips For High SERPs Ranking

However, in cases where there are many pages that may be similar in relevance, page experience can be much more important for visibility in Search. Of course, there are many website page experience signals in place, yes. But, the following signals are important for delivering a good page experience in Google Search.

Learn More: Website Page Experience Is Now The New SERP Ranking Factor

Tools that we’ll need in preparation for the algorithm to hit this year and onward. In our case, we’re incredibly encouraged by the direction that Google’s moving in. Especially, with their E-A-T initiative and with this page experience ranking factor, they’re prioritizing legitimate sites with sound information that creates positive experiences for users.

By incorporating these signals into Search, Google is helping create a better web for everyone. According to uptickmarketing, Google generally stays tight-lipped about ranking factors. And until recently, Google hasn’t even announced algorithm updates, much less the factors that make up the algorithm and determine page ranking in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).

But, on May 28th of 2020, Google announced an algorithm update set to roll onwards. An algorithm update that is geared at evaluating web pages for the experience they create for users. Good UX and effective SEO do go hand in hand, but before this update, user experience issues only affected websites indirectly.

In particular, by decreasing time on page, pages per session, and ultimately Click-Through Rate (CTR) as well as website traffic. With the update, though, Google is placing explicit importance on how pages treat users who visit them, and whether or not a page is worth sending users to at all. There are categories taken into consideration and example questions to answer.

Using GTmetrix For Website Performance Testing And Monitoring

We can’t stress enough what an opportunity Core Web Vitals has, especially when your competitors may not be paying attention to this kind of stuff. Be that as it may, you can go ahead and use the diagnostic tools in Google Search Console and then get along with your website developers and professional SEOs now — to start addressing any issues that are drawbacks.

In its own words, Google stated the following: While all of the components of website page experience are important, we will rank pages with the best information overall, even if some aspects of page experience are subpar. A good page experience doesn’t override having great, relevant content. However, there are cases of multiple pages with similar content.

As such, your overall website page experience becomes much more important for visibility in the SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages) of Google and the like. So, while you have the time, move even beyond Core Web Vitals and ensure that your content is high caliber. After all, high-quality content writing still remains king! So, what more can we do with GTmetrix?

Well, the very basic advantage is for you to analyze your site head-on to see how well it performs! Take advantage of all the features GTmetrix has to offer and make your site the fastest it can be! See how well your website performs, reveal why it’s slow and discover optimization opportunities.

You may think that one performance analysis and one round of optimization/fixes is sufficient to ensure your website is fast forever – but unfortunately, this isn’t the case for most websites. There are many reasons why constant monitoring of your website performance is recommended:

Get a detailed assessment with:

Lighthouse metrics and audits
Web Vitals (LCP, TBT, CLS)
Various Analysis Options
Waterfall, Video, and Report History

GTmetrix will test your page on a schedule and keep track of how it’s doing (learn why monitoring is important). And then again, you’ll get notified when your page is slow — set up an alert and get notified when your page underperforms. They’ll send you an alert linked to a full report so you can know what happened. See how your page loads on different devices.

Whereby, you can easily and quickly test your page on a real Android device or on over 30 different simulated device options. This is where you’ll analyze your performance metrics with iPhones, iPads, Samsung Galaxy/Note, Google Nexus/Pixel phones, and other popular devices. However, mobile testing is only available with GTmetrix Pro in this case.

Last but not least, you’ll also be able to see how your web pages perform around the world. In this case, you’ll be able to see how your page performs in 22 different global test locations — make sure it loads fast for all your visitors worldwide. However, just like in mobile testing, premium location testing is also only available with GTmetrix Pro as well.

How To Use Google Lighthouse As An Alternative

You may think you can get a good feel for how quickly your pages load by typing your URL into the search bar and seeing if it loads well or not. However, different people browse the internet in very different ways, and the way someone searches for your site on the other side of the world might be very different from the way you do.

Google knows the majority of traffic comes from mobile devices, and it also knows that the majority of people don’t have access to super-fast 4G or 5G. To simulate this, Google tests your web page by visiting your site through a suboptimal 3G connection on a slow device. Why does Google do this?

Related Resource: Using Speed Index (SI) To Optimize & Improve Web Performance

Well, pretty much any website can load quickly on a 5G connection, but that’s of no benefit to the majority of people who don’t have such speedy access. Google wants to send all its users to the very best page to answer their search queries, so it aims to rank websites with the best experience.

If your site works well with a poor 3G connection, it will work well with the latest 5G connection. So, Google learns more about your site by testing it with the 3G connection. If this is how Google is judging your website, then it’s how you should be judging your website too—and this is why Google Lighthouse can be so helpful.

Minimize The Main Thread Work

Lighthouse is an open-source, automated tool for improving the performance, quality, and correctness of your overall website and application platforms. When auditing a page, Lighthouse runs a barrage of tests against the page and then generates a report on how well the page did. From here you can use the failing tests as indicators of what you can do to improve your app.

So, if you are familiar with Google Lighthouse, it flags pages that keep the main thread busy for longer than 4 seconds during load. To help you identify the sources of the main thread load, Lighthouse shows a breakdown of where CPU time was spent while the browser loaded your page.

The browser’s renderer process is what turns your code into a web page that your users can interact with. By default, the main thread of the renderer process typically handles most code: it parses the HTML and builds the DOM, parses the CSS and applies the specified styles, and parses, evaluates, and executes the JavaScript.

The main thread also processes user events. So, any time the main thread is busy doing something else, your web page may not respond to user interactions, leading to a bad experience.

Other More Related Resource References:

That’s it! Join thousands of people and companies around the world committed to making the web consistently fast. With the unique page performance tool by GTmetrix, you’ll now be able to make sure that your website is fast for everybody. For one thing, you’ll be able to test your web pages in different countries, browsers, connection speeds, and more…