Sometimes we don’t always want to set up a whole performance testing stack. Occasionally we want to get a rough idea of our sites speed. That may be to check that the latest commit compares well to the previous one, it may be to use as a case to get a performance testing suite properly set up.
When I was first interested in how our site was doing, I used YSlow after @ben.kelly recommended it to me. That then showed the company that we should be looking a bit more in depth into speed and performance so I was allowed time to do a performance testing course.
In my next company, myself and the developers regularly used Lighthouse on Google Chrome.
What tools have you used for site speed analysis? Are there any you found particularly useful over others? What was your goal when you were using these tools?
Yslow and Google Page Speed insights are useful for measuring the client side performance but i think they are not suitable for speed analysis and comparisons(you can compare the progress in your ui performance according to the suggested enhancements)
Webpagetest.org is useful as well because you can select the region and the browser and you can record video as well but it only available for published websites so it cannot be used during development or enhancing a local website.
Network tab in Google Chrome is very useful for getting page load time and it can be done to get a quick info without the need to start a performance project in a PT tool.
