Recommended tools for tracking web performance

While the Statistics page in your ImageEngine Control Panel can give you a lot many meaningful insights into the performance and traffic of your website, there are other third-party tools that can help to give you an even wider perspective.

To make the most of analytics tools, it is always a good idea to have an idea of what your goals are for your website, whether that is reducing payload or improving mobile page speed. Keeping your goals in mind while using these tools can help you to solidify a path forward in the continual endeavor of website optimization.

The following is a list of free tools that we are fans of here at ImageEngine.

Note: Some of the following tools have the option of paying for enhanced features. Their inclusion in the list does not entail a recommendation by ImageEngine to pay for their services. 

WebPageTest

With a plethora of features such as being able to choose the location, browser, device, and connection type, WebPageTest is a robust testing tool and one of our favorites. The number of customizations you can do with your tests and the amount of information given to you at the results stage may seem daunting at first, but once you get the hang of it, this will be an invaluable tool for your testing.

Check out their getting started guide here: https://docs.webpagetest.org/getting-started/

Lighthouse

Lighthouse is an open-source tool built by Google that is a bit more complicated to use but is also a great way to audit your site. 

You can run Lighthouse in Chrome DevTools, from the command line, or as a Node module. When you give Lighthouse a URL to audit, it runs a series of audits against the page, and then it generates a report on how well the page did. From there, you may use the failing audits as indicators on how to improve the page. Each audit has a reference doc explaining why the audit is important, as well as how to fix it.

Check out the LightHouse documentation for instructions for its use here: https://developers.google.com/web/tools/lighthouse/

Tip: WebPageTest actually allows you to capture Lighthouse results using their tool under Advanced Settings > Chromium > Capture Lighthouse Report

PageSpeed Insights

PageSpeed Insights is another tool from Google that is great for helping you understand what your users see when they go to your website. While other websites will give you Time to First Byte or Page Load Time, this tool emphasizes metrics like First Contentful/Meaningful Paint or First Input Delay to really highlight the user experience.

PageSpeed Insights (PSI) reports on the performance of a page on both mobile and desktop devices and provides suggestions on how that page may be improved.

GTmetrix

Test your page in different countries, browsers, connection speeds, and more
GTmetrix gives a detailed report, providing an overall grade, as well as showing the page's Web Vitals scores. In addition to this information, Gtmetrix also detects potential structural problems and provides recommendations to improve them.

When using GTMetrix, ensure that ImageEngine is added to the “CDN Hostnames” section in your GTmetrix account user settings.

ImageEngine is not recognized by GTmetrix as a CDN, which can result in a false negative result for the metric “Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)“. To avoid this, you may manually add ImageEngine to your GTmetrix settings, so that it will be recognized. This may be done in the Gtmetrix User settings.

If you are using a custom domain, GTmetrix does look for CNAME records, so making sure to add *.imgeng.in should make sure that your use of ImageEngine as a CDN is always detected.

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