Common Web Performance Tools

Now that you understand the metrics and the methods of measuring web performance, it’s time to look at the tools!

How do you know what tool to use, what it measures, and how accurate the data is? This chapter will help.

These are some of the best web performance tools available. Each measures your website performance in different ways from different places. These measurements will not always line up, but by understanding what each tool is testing, you will get a more complete picture of how your website performs.

Synthetic Lab Data

Synthetic Lab Data

It also produces a more detailed (and more complex) report with network location, breakdown of timings, and a detailed waterfall chart.

WebPageTest is great for auditing live websites to better understand how they are performing in production.

Synthetic Lab Data

Although the Search Console metrics are synthetic, they are what Google will use to rank your site in search results. They represent a very important user: Google.

The metrics you’ll see in Search Console will be quite slow to update, depending on the traffic to your website. It could be a week or more for Google to see changes in your performance scores, and the reports are very generic.

You need to use Search Console to see how Google ranks your performance, but it’s not very useful for testing or discovering performance issues.

Real-User Field Data

The data is really interesting, but it’s only published monthly and summarized to an entire domain. CrUX data is only accessible through BigQuery and DataStudio, Google’s Data Warehouse tools. If you haven’t used those tools before (like most people), it can be difficult to get meaningful information.

CrUX data is useful to see historical website performance, or compare your performance to other websites, but only if your website is large enough to qualify for inclusion.

Real-User Field Data

The charts are useful and easy to understand. The tool breaks down the large amount of data and gives you meaningful median, p75, and p95 metrics as well as some details on the causes of slowness.

Request Metrics is best for active monitoring of your website performance. It is really helpful when you are making performance changes to see how your improvements impact real users.

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