Best Development Tools for Boosting Website Performance

We’ve compiled a list of best performance tools you can refer to while developing your website so you don’t get lost in the ocean of tools available out there. You may have heard about some of them and some not to go through the complete list and make the best of whats available.

• Mobile site testing.

Google offers Test My Site, an online tool powered by the popular performance tool for websites the WebPageTest.org. The tool calculates Website loading time on a Chrome browser on a mobile device using a 3G network. It will also tell you the user bounce rate due to the sluggish speed. In addition, it also offers fixes to boost your loading speeds.

• Lighthouse by Google

Lighthouse is open-source and I help you run audits for improving your web page quality. It is integrated into the Chrome’s DevTools. It can also be installed as an extension on Chrome or as a CLI-based tool. It is a very important tool for measuring, debugging and improving the performance of client-side applications.

If you are going to use Lighthouse then do check out these Lighthouse-based tools as well:

• webpack-lighthouse-plugin: A Lighthouse plugin for Webpack
• Treo: Lighthouse as a service with a personal free plan.
• lighthouse-cron: a module which can help you track your Lighthouse scores and metrics over time.
• calibreapp: It is a paid service, based on Lighthouse. It helps you track, understand and improve performance metrics based on real Google Chrome instances.

• Lightcrawler

Lightcrawler can be used to crawl your website and later you can run the found pages through Lighthouse. It is used to control the depth of the crawler. The crawler will stop at the pointed depth. It is also Multi-Threads, Easily and Quickly to Build. Lightcrawler can choose which URL should be crawled and which should not be crawled by configuring forbidden regex or allowed regex.

• GTmetrix

GTmetrix is an online tool and you can use to get insights about your website performance specs like load time, total page size, number of requests etc. It will also provide practical recommendations for optimizing your website.

• Page Performance

Page performance is a Chrome extension which will help you run a quick performance analysis. If you are working multiple tabs open, the extension will be run on the active tab being used. FullStack Web Developers tend to use it as a regular practice.

• The AMP Project

The AMP or Accelerated Mobile Pages is an open-source project aimed to make the mobile web faster. The project has helped a lot of mobile app developers in London create fast and high-performing websites with rewarding user experiences on multiple platforms.

• Pngcrush

Pngcrush is a free and open-source PNG optimizer for Windows and Linux. It will optimize your png’s without compromising a lot on quality. The main purpose of pngcrush is to reduce the size of the PNG IDAT data stream by trying various combinations of compression methods and delta filters

• Grinder

A grinder is an open-source tool available a BSD-style license. It is a load testing framework built using Java and it is used to run distributed load tests with multiple load injector machines. Not only HTTP servers to SOAP services and REST APIs but also application servers of CORBA, RMI, JMS and EJBs etc. can be tested using Grinder.

The list is definitely not complete as there are a lot more tools out there but you can use this to get started on your Web Development in London utilizing these.