GTmetrix is proud to announce mobile testing for your sites!

See how your website performs on an actual mobile phone and optimize your user’s experience on a wide variety of mobile devices.

Our mobile service is currently in beta, and so we are only offering mobile testing in our default Vancouver, BC. location and apologize in advance for any issues you might encounter.

Our mobile testing suite

We offer a few tools to help users optimize for mobile:

• Page Analysis with Mobile Specific Rulesets
  We use Google’s Page Speed ruleset with their prioritization for mobile devices.
• High Quality Video Capture
  Get real-time playback of your page loading on a mobile device. We offer full, high-quality video capture without impacting the results of your test.
• More Detailed and Complete HAR Files
  Our mobile HAR files include DNS lookup time, blocking time, window.onload time and DOM loaded time – more accurate than any other mobile HAR file out there. SSL traffic is also properly captured.

Combined with our existing GTmetrix tools, developers can ensure that their site performs the best it can on mobile devices!

How we did it

After an intense period of research and development, we were able to interface GTmetrix with actual Android phones (Galaxy Nexuses).

Utilizing a combination of HDMI adaptors, video capture cards and WiFi configurations, a customized script connects to the Chrome browser application on the phones via WiFi and generates a report that focuses on a specific rule-set tailored for mobile phones (Page Speed Mobile).

One of our Android phones in action

We’re not running simulated tests by restricting resolutions – we’re actually sending your URL to a real Android device!

Read more about our mobile features here »

Get Started With GTmetrix Mobile Testing

Since we’re still in Beta, we currently provide 2 devices for mobile analysis. You may experience a slight queue. PRO users however, will get higher priority for their mobile analyses.

As we mature the service, more devices for analysis as well as more device platforms (iPhones, other Android devices) are planned for the future as usage increases.

Best of all, it’s FREE for registered users! Log in to your GTmetrix account and give it a try. We’d love to hear your feedback!

We’ve been working with e-commerce platform Magento for a while now, and have found it to be a great fit for clients looking for an all-in-one e-commerce solution. However, the stock open source Magento is quite slow, and needs both good hosting and a number of plugins to really get it to where an ecommerce platform needs to be.

We’ve published a few speed guides as part of our work with our GTmetrix project, but for Magento, we went a step further and created a Magento plugin called GTspeed.

How It Works

GTspeed takes four key steps to improve Magento’s performance:

JS/CSS minification

GTspeed removes superfluous data like whitespace and comments from JS and CSS files, decreasing their filesize and speeding up their load times.

JS/CSS script combining

GTspeed merges all JS and CSS scripts into 2 single JS and CSS files, drastically reducing the number of requests sent to your server.

Enable Caching Headers

GTspeed adds headers which allow JS, CSS, and image files to be cached by browsers, preventing unnecessary requests.

Image Optimization

GTspeed uses lossless compression utilities to deliver all images in optimized formats. You can schedule automated image optimizations to ensure that no needlessly large files are ever served on your site.

Results

Installing GTspeed has an immediate and pronounced effect on Magento load times. Here’s a “before and after” breakdown of how GTspeed improves the load time of a default Magento installation, measured with our GTmetrix utility.

Detailed report on the improvements

Get GTspeed Working For You

Read more about how to install how to install and use our free GTspeed plugin.

GTspeed optimizes the front end part of Magento, but equally important is being on solid hosting. Please read more on our managed Magento hosting and the expertise our sysadmins can lend to your Magento installation.

Speed is a critical element in a user’s experience of any website, and Google has suggested that load times may become a factor in page ranking. With this in mind, GT is excited to introduce a free tool for measuring the speed of your site.

GTmetrix subjects individual URLs to a range of tests developed by Google and Yahoo!, and presents the results in a detailed, comprehensive report complete with tips on how to improve your performance.

GTmetrix – Report Page

Why Is Speed Important?

Users want a site that loads fast, period. Studies have shown that many users will leave a site if it hasn’t loaded within four seconds. A faster web experience means more time spent exploring your site and more pages visited (and potentially more sales/ad revenue).

In some cases, speed optimization can significantly reduce server load and hosting expenses by correcting inefficiencies (in code, images and HTTP requests, among other factors). And, if you still need more incentive to look into speed optimization, as mentioned above, your site’s speed may become a factor in Google’s page ranking! (Source)

GTmetrix – Overall Summary

There are plenty of reasons to optimize the speed of your site, but in the end it’s about giving your users a more engaging, more rewarding web experience.

How Can GTmetrix Help?

GTmetrix analyzes your site’s speed and provides you with detailed resources on site optimization. Here’s how:

1. GTmetrix uses Google’s Page Speed and Yahoo!’s YSlow tools to gauge the speed of a URL you provide.
2. GTmetrix generates a report displaying the URL’s Page Speed and YSlow scores, along with detailed lists of the various rules used by each and how the URL ranked on each of them.

GTmetrix – Recommendations and Grading

1. Brief descriptions of specific issues are provided, along with links to Google and Yahoo!’s tutorials on how to remedy page speed issues diagnosed in the report.
2. Report data is tracked, allowing you to review graphs of previous scores to chart your page’s improvement as you implement tips suggested by GTmetrix. Reports can be scheduled to run daily, weekly, or monthly.

GTmetrix – It’s free!

GTmetrix is live and ready to use, and we’ve got plenty more features and additions in the pipeline. GTmetrix is a free service, so please pass it on!

We’re still in beta so we’d love to hear any and all suggestions on how to improve GTmetrix (or any bug reports), so drop us a line and tell us what you think!