Why the speed of your website matters…
- Fewer missed sales opportunties (key metrics include bounce rates, abandonment rates, visitor retention, and various measures of engagement)
- Improved brand perception
- Lower hosting costs (many businesses try to solve their performance woes by upgrading their hosting plans)
- Important for SEO (keyword ranking)
Broadly speaking, there are a two approaches to testing website speed:
- Emulated browser - Google Page Speed Insights
- Real browser - GTMetrix
It's best to test your website using both methods.
Differences between real and emulated browsers
An emulated browser is a software application that tries to imitate the functionality of a web browser. Generally, an emulated browser will have all the same features as a real web browser, including support for HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. However, an emulated browser may not be able to correctly render all web pages, and it may not support all the same plugins and extensions as a real web browser.
A real browser, on the other hand, is a web browser that is actually installed on your computer. Real browsers can render web pages correctly and support all the same plugins and extensions as an emulated browser. However, real browsers may be more resource-intensive than emulated browsers, and they may not run on all platforms.
Although real browsers would seemingly be more accurate, there can be advantages to simulating a broader variety of scenarios using an emulated browser. Therefore, it is often helpful to test the speed of your website using each approach to compare the results and recommendations.
GTmetrix Performance Score often produces similar results as Google PageSpeed Insights. However, it is possible that significant variations between these tools can occur. So, what are the differences between them?
GTmetrix loads your website using an unthrottled connection on custom-built hardware by using a real browser that can be customized according to your needs such as location, connection speed, screen resolution, etc.
Google’s PageSpeed Insights uses emulated browsers to launch performance tests that simulate how your page would load under different network conditions (for example, desktop and mobile). You can't change the test options like location, connection speed, screen resolution, etc.
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