Pingdom Tool

Pingdom is a set of commonly used tools that go beyond website performance monitoring. In addition to page speed analysis, Pingdom comprises uptime monitoring, transaction monitoring, visitor insights (RUM), and server monitoring tools with an alerting system if anything goes wrong with your site. It is one of the most popular performance testing tools in the WordPress community.

Pingdom is a deceptively deep webpage speed tester. Its interface is simple and easy to use. The data generated is well-organized and easy to skim or dive deep into the details. Pingdom is a great tool to provide a client-facing report while also giving your developer information specific enough to address problems.

Pingdom is a Swedish website monitoring software as a service company launched in Stockholm and later acquired by Austin, owned by SolarWinds. The company releases annual reports on global internet use, which are frequently cited in academic publications and media organizations as sources of Internet-related statistics.

Pingdom offers a 14-day free trial, and its website monitoring suite is available starting at $42.12 per month.

Features of Pingdom

Pingdom provides users with a nice mix of options and simplicity. And it offers the following benefits:

• Pingdom lets users test their web page speed from four different testing locations in its current configuration. In general, you're going to want to choose the testing location closest to your website's geographic user base.
• Results are incredibly easy to read, with a letter grade breakdown of performance insights that also provide a specific list of issues to address.
• It is very powerful to solve your most complex website performance and reliability
• Pingdom gets high-quality, reliable monitoring at an affordable price. It has several easy to understand plans that full fill your requirements.
• Pingdom is a part of the SolarWinds DevOps solution, which provides full-stack monitoring as a service.
• Pingdom tracks your website's load time and finds bottlenecks that affect your customers' end-user experience.
• Pingdom makes sure important interactions, such as signup, search, or downloadable files, aren't slow or broken.
• Using Pingdom, you receive alerts via SMS, email, and in-app notifications about error messages, HTTP status, content changes, and more.
• It makes data-driven decisions based on reports with beautiful graphs that clearly show trends.
• Pingdom Toolsdoes have an option to test your website through mobile devices.

How to Use Pingdom Tool

To measure the site's performance using Pingdom, you need to follow the following steps:

Step 1: Use your web browser to go to http://tools.pingdom.com.

Step 2: In the text box, enter the URL of your site that you want to test.

Step 3: If you want to test the site from a particular location, select the geographic region you want.

Step 4: Click on the Start Test button.

After a few seconds, Pingdom analyzes how long it takes to download the page and each element on the page and then provides a waterfall chart of the entire page load process. Each downloaded resource is represented by a color bar on a timeline.

As you can see in the following image, each step of the page load process is color-coded:

• DNS: This is the amount of time it takes for the browser to identify where the site is hosted. Make sure your site uses a reliable DNS server.
• SSL: If the URL specifies SSL (if the URL begins with HTTPS://), the browser exchanges encryption keys with the webserver.
• Connect: This is the amount of time it takes for the browser to open a connection to the server on port 80 (HTTP) or 443 (HTTPS) before the browser sends the request. The server then sends a response when it is ready to accept a request. Using persistent HTTP connections (that is, the Connection: Keep-Aliveheader) reduces the time for subsequent client requests to the server.
• Send: This is the amount of time it takes for the browser to send the request, including the URL, Cache-Controlheaders, cookies for the domain, and any other headers that the browser wants to send (such as User-Agent).
• Wait: This is the most important step and one that you can control as a webmaster. The wait time is the amount of time for the server to process a request, generate content, and start to send a response. It includes processing .htaccess rules, running PHP code, and accessing databases.
• Receive: This is the amount of time it takes to download the requested page after the server starts sending the response.
• Total: This is the total amount of time to do all of the above steps.

Pingdom Tool Test Locations

Currently, Pingdom offers seven different test locations for its free speed test tool:

1. Asia: Tokyo, Japan
2. Europe: Frankfurt, Germany
3. Europe: London, UK
4. North America: Washington D.C., USA
5. North America: San Francisco, USA
6. Pacific: Sydney, Australia
7. South America: Sao Paulo, Brazil

If your site targets a specific geographic area, you should choose the test location that's closest to that area. However, if your site targets visitors worldwide, you'll want to run tests from different locations. This will let you see how your site will load for visitors around the world.

If you notice slow load times in certain areas, you may want to start using a content delivery network (CDN) to speed up your global page load times.

How Pingdom Calculate Load Time?

It is easy to get caught up in optimizing your website's speed score. The only thing that matters is your site's Load Time. Generally, you want to aim for less than two seconds if possible.

However, it's important to understand that "Load Time" isn't always the same across different tools because there are different metrics.

There are two main ways to consider a website as loaded:

1. Onload time: The processing of the page is complete, and all resources (e.g., images) have loaded. However, this doesn't include some events, such as JavaScript, that are important to your page.
2. Fully Loaded Time: The time when the page has completely stopped loading content. This will always be slower than the Onload time.

How to Use Pingdom Advanced Performance Analysis Tools

In addition to basic information on your site's load time, file size, and HTTP requests, Pingdom also includes some advanced analysis tools that go deeper into your site's performance.

Whereas the metrics in the box at the top are a snapshot of how your site is doing, the analysis metrics below it help you to go in and improve your site's performance.

• Summary box: How is my site doing now?
• Advanced analysis: How can I make my site better?

The next sections of the results show the primary areas of concern for the website. Some common features from earlier tests are highlighted here too.

1. Improve Page Performance

The Improve Page Performance section includes seven popular optimization tactics, as well as a score that indicates how well your site is already implementing each tactic, such as:

• Make fewer HTTP requests
• Add Expires headers
• Compress components with gzip
• Use cookie-free domains
• Reduce DNS lookups
• Avoid empty src or href
• Put JavaScript at bottom

2. Response Codes

The response codes section tells you what's going on with all of the resources you're loading on the page and is especially useful if your website's been up and running for a while. Response codes in the 200s or 300s are usually fine, but you'll want to weed out all 400 and 500-class errors.

You can also use the waterfall (more on this in a moment) to figure out which resources are giving you 404 and 500 errors and take the appropriate steps to remove them or modify your site.

3. Content and Request Breakdown

Four tables give you information about the distribution of your content and your requests.

• Content size by content typelists all of your assets grouped together by type, such as images, scripts, CSS, HTML, and so on. You can use this information to weed out any obvious issues. Loading 20MB of images on a page usually means you should optimize your images, and loading 2MB of JavaScript means you need to be more efficient in your use of scripts.
• The requests by content type table show the number of requests your site is making another way to optimize it, and if you're pulling in lots of separate scripts, perhaps it's time to concatenate them into one (or at least a few).
• Content size by domainand requests by domain show similar information regarding the origin of your content and let you quickly see how much external content you're loading on your site.

You want to load content mostly from local sources or from a CDN. If you load a lot of content from off-site sources, you may risk slowing down your site if it has to wait for the slow responses of others.

4. File Requests (Waterfall Analysis)

The file requests section shows every single HTTP request on your site. For example, if you saw 50 HTTP requests in the summary box at the top, this section will have 50 entries, one for each HTTP request.

Developers use this tool to gain a visual understanding of how a site loads and where the bottlenecks are. It shows a wealth of information, especially if you use the expander arrows to get to the details of each request.

The icon on the right indicates the type of content being requested. If the response isn't of the 200 class, you'll see an alert icon.

Finally, there's a horizontal bar graph that shows you when and how the resource loaded.

For local resources, it's a good idea to keep an eye on the connect sizes. Lengthy connect times can indicate a problem with your host that assuming your site is otherwise well-configured. Search for long bars that hinder your website's loading or external resources with a lengthy DNS or another metric.

Pingdom Pricing

Pingdom offers a 14-day free trial and two paid services, each of which has scaling prices depending on your usage:

1. Synthetic Monitoring: It includes transaction monitoring, page speed monitoring, and uptime monitoring.
2. Real User Monitoring (RUM): It allows you to see the actual load times of your real human visitor's experience.

You can choose to use one or both of them, depending on your needs. Each service starts at $10 a month, and the price scales up from there based on the following metrics:

• Several checks for Synthetic Monitoring.
• Monthly page views for Real User Monitoring.

NOTE: The 14-day free trial includes access to both Synthetic Monitoring and Real User Monitoring.

Paid Pingdom Features

When you purchase a pro account of Pingdom, then it provides the following powerful features. You can also test all of these features with a 14-day free trial.

1. Uptime Monitoring: Uptime monitoring is the most basic type of monitoring Pingdom offers. It consists of a graph that combines the average response time with any downtime your site may experience.
2. Transaction Reports: Transaction reports allow you to make sure user interactions spanning multiple actions and pages work smoothly and are invaluable for E-commerce, SaaS applications, and other interaction-based sites.
3. Visitor Insights: Page speed tests tend to be artificial. You load your website in your browser or initiate a test using an external service such as Pingdom. Visitor Insights is a part of the Pingdom RUM service that gives you a bit of code to add to your site. Once added, you'll see how long it took for your site to load for actual visitors instead of you or some automated bot.
4. Alerts: Pingdom offers you a basic alert system out of the box. You can get emails, basic app notifications, and SMS messages, and your alerts will come within minutes.

Pingdom also has built-in integrations for certain apps, such as Slack, and you can also set up your integrations with Webhooks, such as using Zapier and Webhooks to connect to any app.