WebPagetest - Beyond the Basics

Aaron and Andy use WebPagetest on a daily basis to measure the performance of websites, diagnose issues and identify potential improvements.

In this talk they will show how you can do much more with WebPagetest than single page testing: how to run more complex tests and how to interpret results in a way that yields actionable insights. The use cases they plan to cover include:

• What happens to your page load times and the user experience if 3rd party scripts load very slowly, and how to tackle this?

• What performance gains can be made by removing ads, social buttons, analytics and other ‘extras’ that are now common on many web pages?

• How to run multi-page tests (from homepage to shopping cart checkout)

• Using the scripting API. Multiple examples will be shown to provide insight in how to use the most useful methods in the API for scripting in an effective way and gain insight in what works well in certain browsers, but not in others

• What happens if we want to test a site that requires the user to login, how do we know we’ve successfully logged in before we test the next page in our flow?

• Using WebPagetest as a synthetic monitoring tool, to measure how performance changes over time. Is this a good idea? How can you do this?

• How to incorporate WebPagetest into Continuous Integration so performance issues get picked up early in the development process.

After the talk, you will have a good understanding of the advanced capabilities of WPT.