GTmetrix

GTmetrix is a website performance analytics and monitoring tool that helps test a website’s speed and discover optimization opportunities. This solution is ideal for many business websites since page load times are a significant factor in a page’s rankings on the SERPs. GTmetrix breaks down page performance into summarized reports.

GTmetrix keeps track of page scores, page speed, and the number of requests and notifies the user when the page is underperforming. GTmetrix can analyze any webpage’s loading times thanks to the solution’s access to 65 servers located in 22 different test server locations.

Using this analytics solution can help with a company’s digital marketing campaign by helping to make sure that the site has good load times and lands on the first pages of Google’s SERP. Users can also use GTmetrix to test mobile webpages on Android devices and simulate performance.

GTmetrix Features

GTmetrix helps users analyze the performance of their websites and web pages and helps them discover opportunities for improvement. These are possible thanks to GTmetrix’s set of features, which include the following:

Monitoring slots

Users can assign a particular webpage URL to be monitored by GTmetrix. This consumes one monitoring slot, which can be configured according to an Analysis Option (location, device, connection speed) and monitoring type (hourly, daily). This allows users to check the performance of specific web pages based on the location, device, and connection speed used to access the site.

GTmetrix Reports

GTmetrix replaced its PageSpeed and YSlow libraries with Lighthouse, allowing the new GTmetrix Report to be redesigned while incorporating Lighthouse data and metrics. This allows for a new scoring system in the GTmetrix Report. The new report features the all-new GTmetrix Grade and the Performance and Structure scores.

GTmetrix Grade measures how fast a page performs in terms of load times, interactivity, and visual stability. This reflects the overall webpage experience, as it accounts for both the front-end structure and the actual end-user experience. The grade is a weighted average of the Performance Score and Structure Score. The Performance Score is made up of six key metrics (which are the First Contentful Paint, Largest Contentful Paint, Speed Index, Total Blocking Time, Cumulative Layout Shift, and Time to Interactive), while the Structure Score focuses on both custom GTmetrix and standard Lighthouse audits.

In addition to GTmetrix Grade, GTmetrix Reports also shows Web Vitals and their key metrics in the report. The key metrics are the Largest Contentful Paint, Total Blocking Time, and Cumulative Layout Shift.

Basically, GTmetrix measures whether a particular webpage has good load times, is responsive, and suffers from unexpected layout shifts. 

Global testing

Users will be able to test the performance of their web pages when accessed from different locations thanks to GTmetrix’s multiple test server locations worldwide. Some locations are available for free testing through the Basic plan, while others are locked behind the GTmetrix PRO paywall.

Global testing is necessary to ensure that a site is well-optimized enough that a specific customer base from a certain location will have easy access to the site or key web pages.

Mobile testing

Because webpages will be opened on both desktop and mobile devices, it’s important to check their performance on different devices to ensure a good user experience. This is possible since users can test the page on either a real Android device or on over 30 simulated device options.

GTmetrix Mobile Testing is only available with GTmetrix PRO.

Waterfall charts

GTmetrix comes with Waterfall Charts that help reveal insights to identify long or broken requests, understand how a browser behaves when it loads a page, view request details, and filter by request type, or sort by domain, status code, or size.

GTmetrix Benefits

Using GTmetrix allows users to effectively check a webpage’s performance and make any necessary adjustments to the page to improve performance. Some of the benefits of using GTmetrix as an analytics tool include the following:

Functional basic/free GTmetrix plan

GTmetrix did not put all of its features behind a paywall. The free GTmetrix plan is feature-rich, but has limitations in the number of monitored slots, weekly on-demand tests, daily API credits, and report retention.

The Basic plan can give users insights to keep a small business website performing well until it’s necessary to get a paid plan with more functionalities.

Customizable GTmetrix PRO plan

Apart from the preset Individual and Business plans, users will be able to get a custom plan tailor-fit for their needs to ensure that they won’t run out of on-demand tests and API credits, as well as that they have enough monitored slots to thoroughly monitor their webpages.

When using the custom plan, users can configure how many monitored slots, weekly on-demand tests, and daily API credits they have, how long data is retained before it is deleted, whether hourly monitoring and/or white-label PDF reports are required, and whether the user will be billed monthly, quarterly, or yearly.

White label reports

Users have the option to use their own company’s branding instead of the GTmetrix branding on the reports. The cost for branding the reports with the user’s logo and company brand is $50.

GTmetrix Pricing

GTmetrix offers two plan types: Individual and Business, as well as Custom plan types. Under the Individual type are the free Basic plan, the $13-per-month Solo plan, the $25-per-month Starter plan, and the $50-per-month Growth plan. Under the Business type, businesses can get the $75-per-month Champion plan, the $200-per-month Team plan, the $530-per-month Enterprise plan, and the custom-priced Custom plan.

The paid Individual plans are fairly affordable for freelancers and small businesses, especially when considering the features included in them. While the free plan is still functional for individuals with their blog pages, websites, or portfolios, it lacks more useful features that small businesses will need to improve their online visibility, including higher queue priority for testing, PRO analysis options, higher queue concurrency, etc.

The Business plans are ideal for small to medium-sized businesses due to their more extensive feature sets that include hourly monitoring, global monitoring, access to premium test locations, mobile device testing, and all the included features in the Individual plans. The Enterprise plan has more features, including priority support, GTmetrix performance consulting, and all features present in the Team plan, including white-label PDF reports.

The Custom plan allows users to tailor-fit their plans according to their needs, allowing them to scale up certain portions of the plan to meet their needs and cut down on others to limit the cost of using the plan. While it’s possible to customize the number of monitored slots, weekly on-demand tests, daily API credits, data retention period, billing cycle, and the inclusion of hourly monitoring and white-label PDF reports, users will automatically unlock several features regardless of their configurations. The automatically unlocked features include global monitoring, access to premium test locations, mobile device testing, high queue priority, high queue concurrency, unlimited tags and filters, PRO analysis options, and history visualization.

GTmetrix does not offer any free trial versions, but it does have the free Basic plan. However, the GTmetrix website says to contact them when wanting to test the PRO version.

When opting for one of the paid versions, users can get a 5% discount when paying quarterly or a 15% discount when paying yearly.

Conclusion

GTmetrix is a great analytics solution to monitor the performance of webpages, and possibly entire websites, through the platform’s monitoring slots and reports feature. Individual website owners and freelancers can use GTmetrix to manage their small websites at an affordable price using one of the Individual plans while businesses can also have a cost-effective solution with better features through the Business plans.

Users will be able to take advantage of GTmetrix’s features that are appropriate for the cost of each plan. The free plan has extremely limited features but is still ideal for individuals who are only concerned with ensuring that the homepage is performing well. The cheap Solo plan can be ideal for small businesses that want to improve the performance of a few more pages, including a product or service page. Still, the paid plans under the Individual plan types unlock several useful features that make it worthwhile.

GTmetrix helps many businesses improve their online visibility, especially when they’re also executing a digital marketing campaign and want to rank highly. GTmetrix can help test the speed and performance of certain web pages and give users the opportunity to fix underperforming pages. The only thing that users need to do is make sure that they’re subscribed to the right plan to meet their specific needs.