Useful Tools

Site Performance

Performance Measurement

WebPageTest - Website Performance and Optimization Test has many excellent free options for testing the speed and performance of your site. Configuration options include traffic source location, simulated network speeds (eg 3G), browser dimensions, etc. The outputs include a visualization of the page load over time and a comprehensive timeline of all calls made during the page load.

Load Testing

To understand how your IoGT deployment will perform under various levels of user load, you might use a load testing tool.

Loadster is an external load testing tool. It allows you to easily "record" scripts from your browser that replicate the activities you do. A $120 package of "Fuel" goes a long way for people with lesser testing needs, and monthly subscriptions are available for those that require higher volumes of simulated activity.

Azure Load Testing - Tools and Services | Microsoft Azure is a good option if you are hosting on Azure. It will test your platform under load, but also provides a dashboard which monitors internal metrics - which is valuable for tracing performance issues.

Availability Monitoring

Freshping has a free service (up to 50 "checks") that will load pages on your site on a repeating schedule to assess whether it is available. You can set up a "check" that accesses your Homepage every 1 or 5 minutes - Freshping will note how long the page took to load, and if the Homepage cannot be accessed you can receive a notification via email.

Search Performance

Google Search Console has useful information about your site's search performance and suggestions on how to improve. You can also use the "Removals" function to request removal of URLs within your site from Google Search's index.

Site Accessibility

tota11y – an accessibility visualization toolkit (khan.github.io) is available as a bookmarklet that will launch a small menu on the bottom left-hand corner of your screen. The tool provides valuable insights on the implementation of accessibility features, and the friendliness of your design toward people with disabilities - for example it can measure the amount of contrast between your background and text colors.