Pingdom is one of the top website speed testing websites in the internet world. A fast web speed is the most important thing in the online world, and therefore, one needs to understand the load times to make any improvements in the future. If a person can optimize the loading time of a website, then no one can stop it from increasing sales and conversion rates.
Pingdom is a top-rated premium tool that is very helpful to test the website loading speed. It may look like a relatively simple testing tool because of a basic free speed test, but the Pingdom speed test tool offers a whole world of other features to the users once they can register.
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What is Pingdom?
Pingdom is a Swedish Company owned by SolarWinds that offers various services like transaction monitoring, server monitoring, uptime monitoring, page speed monitoring, real user monitoring, etc. It is known for the free website speed test tool that offers a quick insight into the page loading speed of a website and different ways to improve it.
An individual is not required to be a speed performance expert to audit the site’s speed through the Pingdom test. Its users find it very effortless to use, and its improvement recommendations are also quite easy for anyone to understand, even if a person doesn’t have a technical background.
Conducting a Pingdom speed test
There are three simple steps to run a Pingdom speed test. The first step is to add a URL of your website in the box that is located on the tool page. In the next step, you select the location from where you would like to run the test. Clicking on the ‘Run Test’ is the third and final step.
At present, it allows its users to conduct the tests from seven different locations, which include Asia, Europe, North America, the Pacific, and South America. It is always suggested to choose an area closest to the target audience’s geographical location. This way, it gets easier to understand how the site loads from the customers’ point of view.
On the other hand, if you find your audience to be spread all across the globe, then you have the option to conduct the Pingdom test from each of the locations that are available to you in order to get a more accurate picture regarding how your site is performing.
Understanding Pingdom website speed test
- Overall result
After hitting the ‘Run Test’ tab, Pingdom generates a test report after a few seconds. The first panel of the test report shows:
- Performance grade
It measures your website’s performance and overall speed, while there is also a score and a grading system.
- Page size
It measures the weight of the entire page, whereas the content is measured in Megabytes.
- Load time
The load time of a website is considered as a page load time with Pingdom tools. Onload time is the time required to download all the website resources, which includes the images and the content. However, it is worth noting that some events like JavaScript code are excluded.
- Requests
It refers to the number of HTTP requests that are required by your website.
- Improve page performance
Most of the time, people give attention to the overall performance grade of the website, but one needs to keep in mind that making website improvements are much more important than having a perfect score. This is among the main reasons why one should always be focusing on improvement recommendations. Especially, if you have a wordpress website, optimizing wordpress website is the most important one.
It would help if you analyzed the recommendations carefully to find out where your site is lacking and then fix those issues. If you find some of the suggestions to be impractical or a little hard to implement for your website, you should never be worried about that.
Basically, there are seven-speed optimization suggestions given by the Pingdom speed test for each website. These suggestions may vary from one website to another. A few of these suggestions are reducing DNS lookups, making fewer HTTP requests, avoiding any URL redirects, putting JavaScript at the bottom, and avoiding any empty src or href.
- Response Codes
These are known to be the HTTP status codes, which can communicate whether a particular server request has been completed successfully or not. Basically, they inform you that the resources on your website are loading without an error or not.
The response codes have been divided into five classes which are the informational responses, successful responses, redirects, client errors, and Server errors. The informative and successful response codes are fine, but any of the client or server errors must be eliminated if they are detected during the audit.
- Content and request breakdown
- Type of Content
There is a portion of space taken by each resource on your web page. Pingdom allows you to identify which of the content elements are taking up much of the resources of the page and then try to optimize their size.
It is worth noting that compressing the images can definitely improve the speed of a website. Another way to reduce the loading time of a page is to remove some of the photos that have less importance.
- Domain
The breakdown of the size of the content and the requests by domain can show you the scripts or the external services used by your website. For example, External calls are made by WordPress to Google Analytics, Pinterest, and Facebook. Therefore, the third-party requests are completely dependent on the services used by your website.
You are always recommended to keep the minimum external calls; therefore, lower is better for you. This is because you may face issues like DNS lookups or delayed TLS handshakes if you load content or code from the outside parties, and this will slow the loading speed of your website.
- Waterfall chart
With a waterfall chart, you are able to have a deeper look into the speed of your site by dissecting each and every HTTP request a browser can make to the server of your website. An HTTP request is made to the website server to load every asset of a webpage, like images, content, HTML, JavaScript, CSS, etc.
Every HTTP request can follow a series of steps before being completed successfully. A waterfall chart visually represents the amount of time that it takes to complete each step for every HTTP request. The Waterfall chart of the Pingdom speed test is divided into a few steps, SSL, DNS, connect, send, wait and receive.
There is a different color denoted to each of the steps in the Waterfall analysis. If one happens to find some issues, it is important to take appropriate measures to find out the reasons and then ways to resolve the problems.
Premium features
Although the free version of the Pingdom website speed test looks great, it doesn’t offer anything substantial that differentiates it from GTmetrix. On the other hand, the Pingdom tools Pro account has become a powerhouse of extraordinary features of Pingdom. The following are the Pingdom Pro premium features.
- Uptime
There are chances that your host may not be as much reliable, and therefore, uptime monitoring is the basic monitoring offered by the Pingdom speed test. There is a graph combining the average response time with any downtime experienced by your website.
If you take your site down for four to five minutes, you will be able to see whether Pingdom catches this or not. Pingdom will show you a tiny red pip along the bottom, and they will even send you an email within two minutes of taking the site down.
- Performance
The reports of the page speed in with Pingdom test are quite the same as the free tool on the site that combines with the historical data. Therefore, it is still great for catching any of the nasty trends or slowness that is code-related.
- Reports
The most powerful of the features are the transaction reports that Pingdom has. These particular reports are helpful for you to make sure that the pages are working smoothly and the user interactions are spanning multiple interactions. These are great for webshops, SaaS applications, and other sites that are interaction-based.
The main idea is to use a simple editor to guide Pingdom tools regarding the navigation through your website and then check the results. You have the option to instruct Pingdom to load the homepage, check whether it is giving a 200-status code, try to fill in a search field, and then get a result.
Regarding the transaction reports, Pingdom offers its users an excellent tutorial video, and it also helps them how to set up the reports. Therefore, it is always suggested that the users take a look at the tutorial video.
- Monitor
Normally the page speed results are artificial. You can load a website in your browser or start a test by using Pingdom as an external service. This can be great, and most of the time, it follows what is in reality, though not always.
With real user monitoring, you can add a bit of code to your website, just like Google Analytics. When you add it, you will be able to see real data rolling in it. You will know the time that it took for your site to load for the actual visitors as compared to yourself or an automated bot.
With real data, you can have insight far beyond the test locations available for you because your visitors can come from all over the world. For the satisfied, tolerating, and frustrated visitors, you can set the load time conditions to segment your view in a better way. With the Pingdom speed test, you are offered an out-of-the-box basic alert system. You can get the basic app notifications, emails, and SMS messages.
- API
If there is a large application that you are working on, then it is recommended to use the Pingdom Beep Manager that sends you the right alert at the right time. Although you may have to buy the pricey advanced account, it will surely be worth your investment.
You are also able to get the option regarding who gets the notifications, scheduled maintenance times, and a lot more. Pingdom’s API can also be used to set up some advanced tools. At present, two tools, namely Liberato and Webhooks, are available. With Webhooks, Pingdom will be sending Post data to the URL that you choose, and this data can be intercepted and used by you according to your needs.
Pingdom also offers you an integration with your own incident management tools. You will be notified of the downtime of your client websites, you can also create your own stats dashboard, and there are a number of things that you can do with it.
App for Mobiles
There is an extremely handy free mobile app offered by Pingdom, and it is available both for Android and iPhone. You will find it to be working brilliantly, and it also looks amazing, and it is surely a great companion for receiving any notifications and keeping yourself updated regarding any of your websites, no matter where you are.
This mobile app is also capable of showing you the basic data like the uptime checks and the response time. It can surely be a great bonus to your pro account that is superb to use. You will find it to be quite rare for the services that didn’t originate on the mobile platforms.
Prices
You may find Pingdom to be a little expensive, but for what it offers, it really isn’t that expensive. Its basic account costs $14.95 per month, and it includes ten checks, an advanced check, real user monitoring, 50 SMS messages, silver support as well as basic alerts.
Its higher-level accounts can add things up. The advanced account is $89.95 a month and offers a Beep Manager, whereas a Professional monthly account costs $249, but it adds multi-user logins, subdomain monitoring, invoice payments, gold support, and tags for the real user monitoring.
You may feel that the prices get hefty near the professional account, but they are surely worth it. You may not even require a Pingdom account if you have a personal blog, and a free check now and again will be enough. If you have a webshop, you can begin with free reviews, and if you start to get more orders, then you can make an investment of $45.95 that gives you three transaction checks.
Final Words
Pingdom is the highest-ranked website speed test tool that has been able to build a service equally useful for the people who want to grow their personal sites and also the bigger web-based organizations. Users find its dashboard to be a joy to navigate. Other than that, they have an incredibly useful mobile application, while their on-site help is also very easy to understand and follow. Therefore, experts recommend Pingdom tools to be the best in measuring and monitoring website performance.