Performance is at the forefront of every website. Offering the best user experience on your website will require much care and attention to every detail on your website starting from your web’s design to the website performance.
Keeping up with the latest trends can be quite challenging which is why for this article we decided to compile a list with all the best performance testing tools to test out your website and get valuable insights on how to improve various aspects of your site. Having the best performance testing tools is essential for ensuring your website works without fault. The reason you should always look after the performance of your website is that at the bottom line is will directly influence conversion as well as user experience, two main aspects of your website.
When you wish to check if your software has any glitches, there are several types of performance tests you could do. Load testing is a type of performance testing tool that mimics real-life load conditions. This way you will be able to determine and witness how the application or the website will perform when exposed to actual users simultaneously. A loading test performance tool will detect:
- What’s the maximum operating capacity of an application
- Will determine whether or not the current environment is suitable and sufficient to run the application
- Will measure the sustainability of application with respect to peak user load
- Will notify the number of current users that an application can support
- Scalability to allow more users to access the application
In this article, we’ll look at some of the best performance testing tools, their features, and benefits, and help you choose the most suitable ones for your needs.
The Best Performance Tools List for Testing Websites
These are the best performance testing tools that we will elaborate further in this article.
We’ve collected a list with all the best load testing tools to give you an overview of their best traits and features. During our selection stages, we made sure all the following are the best performance testing tools and that present a clean interface, we took into account the learning curve whether or not it’s easy to learn how to work with these performance testing tools.
Also, all the testing load tools we’ve compiled will integrate with other tools as well as present built-in advanced integration to elevate their functionality. See the list of the best performance tools and evaluate which will suit your website/software better using the criteria we’ve served above as well as in terms of price and usability.
WebLOAD generates a test script in JavaScript, with the flexibility to add a wide range of protocols and easily extend to additional protocols as needed. WebLOAD is an amazing and one of the best performance testing tool that gives you all the flexibility to run tests as well as analysis on your pre-published website/software and gives you valuable insights on traffic load.
WebLOAD gives you the possibility of a free trial to test out this performance testing tool for up to 50 virtual users. If you think that WebLOAD is the right choice, you can choose one of their pricing plans to get you started based on the characteristics of your website/software.
WebLOAD offers an intuitive dashboard from where you can create, execute, schedule, and analyze tests – all from your web browser, either on-premise or in the cloud. Using this performance testing tool you simulate thousands of users visiting your site from different locations at the same time, but also perform cloud load testing and continuous testing.
You can get better insights and identify performance problems by analyzing test results quickly and accurately. Once you are done with your performance tests you will obtain practical reports with insights and reports enabling you to identify the weak spots on your website/software.
Kinsta APM is a custom-designed performance testing tool to help you monitor your WordPress website and be in the loop with the latest insights and trends of your site. Kinsta APM will help you identify key issues on your WordPress website, and for sites hosted within Kinst’s servers, this feature is available for free.
With Kinsta APM as one of the best performance testing tools you can get the right data and insight to help you identify what’s wrong and needs to be fixed and get your business back on track quite easily and hassle-free. Get the right data and insight with Kinsta APM to help you identify what’s wrong and needs to be fixed. Get your business back on track. Kinsta APM provides insights on slow PHP transactions, external requests, MySQL queries, and more.
You will be able to debug slow database queries, long API calls, non-optimized plugin and/or theme code, slowest, average, and median transactions, long external URL requests, and more. Kinsta APM is made for WordPress and offers great hosting services for WordPress websites.
Kinsta APM is one of the best performance testing tools and is made available and helpful for everyone, from agencies and eCommerce site owners to developers, helping them detect issues and as well as troubleshoot performance complications quickly while reducing their expenditure on costly APM tools.
Loadero is another amazing candidate for our collection of the best performance testing tools to help you create and run tests that are fast and straightforward for determining system defects and limitations as well as develop explicit and sophisticated scenarios and test configurations. With
Loadero you can write a test script in JavaScript, Java, or Python for a performance test, create large-scale load tests as well as record the session for debugging. This performance testing tool allows you to run tests on Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox, add fake media elements to simulate the use of microphones and webcams, test software in different network conditions including 12 different locations around the globe.
You can run specific tests to get more detailed results like grouping users and assigning various configurations as per your needs. Loadero supports running tests on 5 latest versions of Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox browsers.
Among the best features of Loader also include the possibility to run existing performance test setup whenever you need to run load tests, add fake media feed in tests to simulate webcam and microphone inputs, retrieve detailed information about client performance during the test, as well as cloud-hosted infrastructure.
The Apache JMeter is a popular open-source application based solely on Java designed to load test functional behavior and measure performance. Apache JMeter is an outstanding and one of the best performance testing tools aimed to help you test performance both on static and dynamic resources, Web dynamic applications.
This is a free performance testing tool that you can use to create automated load scripts and generate the load to the volume you need to run performance tests on your website or web application. Apache JMeter enables you to simulate heavy workloads from any operating system, be it Windows, macOS, Linux, etc. This tool has the capacity to be loaded into a server or network to check on its performance and analyze its working under different conditions.
Using Apache JMeter you can run tests to see how your website/software will survive under extreme conditions, heavy transactions, heavy browsing, and more. Once the testing is complete, the results are displayed on graphs and charts. The Apache JMeter performance testing tool introduces a multi-threading framework.
This means you can create multiple threads within one process and then simultaneously you can separate the threads into groups to sample several functions. The tool is easy to use and doesn’t demand highly sophisticated infrastructure for testing, and is compatible with many load injectors manageable with one controller.
LoadNinja is another outstanding cadidate on our list of the best performance testing tools for WordPress websites aimed to help users diagnose web and API performance issues. LoadNinja introduces a simple and clean UI interface as well as an easy learning curve to load test with an instant and easy-to-use interface, as well as real browsers for reliable data. LoadNinja is a very convenient performance testing tool and uses real browsers which tend to deliver a more accurate representation of the load testing.
LoadNinja doesn’t require any coding for test creation because it packs the AI-enhanced InstaPlay recorder. The performance testing tool provides 4 different pricing plans starting from $1279 per year offering 100 virtual users per test.
With LoadNinja long gone are days of traditional testing, instead of testing the protocol, you test out the actual end-user experience across tens of thousands of browsers using our TrueLoad technology. Thanks to this tool you can create and run tests in mere minutes, no matter the complexity.
You can also generate loads on different locations as well as stimulate realistic loads on your API. To be better understand the tests you run, LoadNinja provides you with performance statistics that are available in real-time helping you make sense of how your APIs are working and whether or not there are blockages or issues hindering the usual process of your website or software.
We continue our collection with Wapt, an amazing performance testing tool for WordPress websites and other sites in general that lets users design or run tests locally or in the cloud. Wapt employs a universal performance test design approach by recording real-life web sessions from a browser or a mobile application.
This is a performance testing tool perfect combination of efficiency and flexibility with ease of use. It is a simple solution suitable for all applications, websites, mobile applications, CRM systems, and more. They introduce a simple test design approach by recording real-life web sessions from a browser or a mobile application. In terms of UI Wapt provides a dull interface and comes across as quite dated in the color, look, feel, and even text orientation.
WAPT provides detailed information about the virtual users and their output to its users during the load testing. This is considered to be the best cost-effective tool for analyzing the performance of web services. A simple test environment can be created and implemented within minutes.
Once done with the tests, you will be presented with reviews and analytics in form of descriptive statistics and graphs to show the performance of your system depending on the load you’ve created in different testing periods. This performance testing tool comes at a price of $700 for the starter pack, but also provides a free trial for its users.
LoadView is a cloud-based performance testing tool that allows you to run tests and analyses on real browsers, to test their websites, web apps, and APIs with thousands of concurrent connections. With LoadView you can test web pages, web applications, as well as web services using their advanced features and tools. LoadView uses Amazon Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Azure Cloud Services.
LoadView is one of the best performance testing tools because it gives you the possibility of a free trial, where you can start for free and then choose one of their pricing plans as it suits your needs. Their cheapest plan starts at $199 allowing you to test the software performance on up to 1000 virtual. Their “On Demand” plan on the other hand gives you the freedom to run tests with up to 1 million users and test out the resilience of your web application.
You can determine whether your website can handle spikes of traffic by setting a testing environment where you generate loads based on a specific number of users over a specified timestamp. You can ensure that your website or software can handle the expected increase in traffic. The LoadView tool provides you with detailed statistics and lets you keep track of the average response time for all locations.
BlazeMeter is another open-source performance testing tool for shift-testing. Since it’s open-source you can use the platform for free for up to 50 users, and if you wish to have more features and accessibility, you will need to upgrade to one of their pricing plans.
BlazeMeter introduces an intuitive UI interface to help you create or reuse your existing scripts and run them at scale and determine whether you have issues undergoing your website of the software. You can test and generate detailed reporting and see historic trends. Simulate thousands or millions of virtual users from over 55 geo-locations, all using your favorite open source tools: Apache JMeter, Selenium, Gatling, Grinder, and more.
BlazeMeter provides all the components you need for shift-left continuous testing. Work with CLIs, APIs, UI, open-source tools, and more. Once you are done with running tests, BlazeMeter will give you rich and insightful statistics and graphs to help you notice the faulty issues.
You can run analysis as well as download critical metrics including response time percentiles, bandwidth, and errors. You will also be able to create Comparison Reports that help you to keep track of performance changes over time.
Parasoft Load Test, enables users to take SOAtest functional test projects and leverage them for performance testing with ease. Parasoft LoadTest provides a simple and intuitive interface that makes running tests and analyzing performance much easier.
Parasoft LoadTest is one of the best performance testing tools. The Load Test Continuum (LTC) web-based reporting app makes it easy to make performance testing a part of the CI/CD process to efficiently implement performance test automation. One of the best parts of the software is that minimal experience/training is needed to get started. Users can easily pull from Excel or XML files, as well, and automating the APIs is intuitive.
Once the performance report is done you can examine its results in custom reports that you can configure to record whatever level of detail suits your needs, all presented on statistical graphs reporting their individual request and response traffic.
Parasoft provides unique functionality to access all recorded details at any point in a load test by saving a load test report without stopping a load test in progress. Users can perform scalability tests as a sequence of load tests with increasing load levels, and then compare the results of different runs in a single view.
Continuing our list of the best performance testing tools, it’s time we introduce K6, an open-source load testing tool and SaaS for engineering teams designed primarily for developers. The main goal of this amazing and free performance testing tool is to check site performance.
The backend of the tool is written in the Go language, whereas the scripts are written in Java. Using the free version of the tool you can run analyses with up to 50 load tests. K6 also provides premium packages that include advanced features as well as more load capability. This is a very convenient tool if you are running your business, website, or software on a tight budget, as their pricing plans start from $59 per year.
The tests are run in console mode, and test results are also output to the console by default, but plugins for displaying results as Kafka, Datadog, InfluxDB, JSON, and StatsD are available. Besides the open-source, K6 also provides a dense cloud-based version that offers more functionality and features as well as a larger loading scale.
Depending on the premium package you require, K6 offers the possibility to determine the duration of the tests, see the results almost in real-time, or contact their support team for any difficulties you might be facing. Testing scripts are written in JavaScript, thus allowing developers to manipulate different scenarios as per their needs.
Final Thoughts
We must end our article here and hope that you are left with a myriad of online resources that are the best performance testing tools for every website. Our collection is diverse and highly advanced, as all of the testing tools presented above offer high-end service and top-notch features for monitoring and analyzing your site’s performance, thus making sure your site reaches its peak.
Generally, the websites that take less than 3 seconds to load are considered great websites, this why having a performance tool to observe your website is essential. The more you are aware of how well your website works and by continuously enhancing its performance, the better for your business.
