Uptime.com offers a free speed test tool to help you pinpoint and correct problems related to site loading time and performance. The following article instructs you on how to use the speed test and view results.
- How to Access the Uptime.com Speed Test
- Speed Test Use Case: International Ecommerce
- Understanding Test Results
- Other Use Cases
How to Access the Uptime.com Speed Test
There are two ways to access the Uptime.com Speed Test:
- From your Uptime.com account
- In the Free Tools section of the Uptime.com website. (Go to Free Tools>Speed Test in the top navigation menu from the homepage)
If you have an Uptime.com account and are already logged in, you will be taken to the speed test in your account. You can run a new test, or view the results from your last 10 tests.
If you’re not logged in or do not have an Uptime.com account, the page will look like the screenshot below. Instead of showing the last 10 tests you’ve run, you can see the last 10 tests run publicly.
Speed Test Use Case: International Ecommerce
Because a slow-loading site can affect SEO and customer experience, ecommerce companies will find the Uptime.com speed test useful.
For our example, let’s assume we are a well-established international ecommerce company based in London. We’ve noticed a big drop in sales from Japan over the past 6 months. 75% of our business came from Japan previously.
In order to determine if site speed is the reason for the drop in sales, our first course of action is to run speed tests from several locations (instead of using the random location) to see if that’s the issue.
- Enter the URL you would like to test
- Select the location you would like to test from.
For this test, we’ll choose the following locations:
- New York City, NY, USA
- Paris, France
- Los Angeles, CA, USA
- London, England
- Tokyo, Japan
We won’t use Random Location, where the system randomly selects a location, as geography is a concern for us. If we had not noticed a single region’s sales dropping, testing Random Locations would be useful to optimize an international eCommerce business.
- Hit the Go or Start Testing button.
Understanding Test Results
Uptime.com provides results for 5 key areas:
- Mobile Usability
- Loading Time
- Performance Grade
- Requests
- Total Size
The test also provides the location the test was run from, as well as the date and GMT time the test was run. Here is a breakdown of the four results tabs provided by Uptime.com:
- Recommendations: Gives you a list of areas where your site could use improvement. Clicking on each suggestion shows detailed information about the domain you tested
- Analysis: Gives detailed information about the size and loading time of website content, as well as where the original content resides including information coming from outside of your domain.
- Waterfall: Lists all website content, including the type, where it’s located, its size, and at what time during the loading process it loads, as well as how long a content type takes to load.
- History: Lists the last 10 times this test was run. If you’re logged in to your Uptime.com account, it will show the last 10 tests run on the same domain. If you’re not an Uptime.com user, it will show the last 10 tests run publicly.
After running the speed test from five locations, we discovered that the site was running particularly slowly from Tokyo.
By using the analysis section, we realized that we had installed several new plugins and suspected that may be the problem. To diagnose this issue, we can use the Waterfall.
The Waterfall tab provides the data we need to determine which plugin was to blame. It tells us the load times of every content type included on the site. The Waterfall also shows how much of the entire loading time the plugin is using. Rather than disabling and reactivating every plugin, we can disable which plugin is eating up too many resources during load and re-run the test to see if load times improve.
Other Use Cases
Ecommerce is just one of the many industries that find speed testing useful. Any company with a website will find the speed test to be an invaluable tool in their arsenal.
And with detailed recommendations on each and every problem, fixing it is a breeze. Simply follow the suggestions and retest.