Sitespeed.io
Performance testing typically targets server side performance. We often disregard the browser response times due to the variations with hardware, software, network and browsers. So it was interesting to use sitespeed.io for the first time and see what extra information could be gathered around performance.
Install sitespeed.io and first execution
In this example we install sitespeed.io as a docker container. The following command will pull down the sitespeed.io container and then initiate a test against two wikipedia pages.
docker run --rm -v "$(pwd)":/sitespeed.io sitespeedio/sitespeed.io:12.1.0 -b chrome --chrome.timeline https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama
A series of executions against each page will be undertaken with output returned to the console while in progress.
Test Report
Once the test has completed a HTML report is generated providing a plethora of information.
The Summary page provides a good visual queue of areas requiring further investigation. The documentation which describes the data reported can be found at https://www.sitespeed.io/documentation/
The Detailed Summary page allows you to drill further into the data captured. It reports scores, response times, load times, resource sizes and break downs of how long visual completion takes.
The Pages tab provide specific measures for each tested. This would be beneficial where a large number of pages are tested to identify any specific performance problems. In this example you can see the Barack Obama page has the heavier footprint.
With the ever increasing number of devices used to browse the internet, a tool such as sitespeed.io, provides us with additional information to better understand the users journey. It may not be an out and out performance testing tool but will certainly be another tool in performance testers toolbox.