Free SEO Tool from Wordfence – Fast or Slow, Wordfence introduced a new site speed tool. This tool tests site speed from thirteen points around the world and provides useful information on where bottlenecks are happening and why.

What is Fast or Slow

FastOrSlow.com is a free site speed diagnostic tool. It uses Lighthouse to test site speed from thirteen geographic areas, simulating how a browser will download content.

The data provided by Fast or Slow differs from Lighthouse in that it provides real-world data from 13 locations worldwide.

Lighthouse and many other site speed diagnostic tools do not provide simultaneous testing from locations around the world.

Even though the tool is testing from so many locations at once, it is actually remarkably fast. 

The new tool offers a performance score that is based on First Contentful Paint, First Meaningful Paint, Total Blocking Time, Speed Index, Time to Interactive and First CPU Idle Scores.

But those are just a few of the reports it offers. There is a whole lot more to this tool.

This interactive summary gives an at a glance review of all thirteen locations. Hovering over one of the tabs reveals more information.

Based on Lighthouse but Different

Although Fast or Slow is based on Lighthouse, the data is different. Here is how Fast or Slow explains the differences:

“…we’re using Google’s Lighthouse to do the actual benchmarking by launching a headless Chrome instance at all 13 locations around the world when we benchmark your site.

However, Lighthouse produces scores that use 2018 industry data from HTTPArchive.

We prefer to use current site performance data to produce comparative speed scoring. So we queried the 2020 data that HTTPArchive provides, and we used that to produce the scores that Fast or Slow gives you from each location for your site.”

The tool could be said to be more accurate.

Chrome Lighthouse uses estimated scores because the Chrome Lighthouse version throttles CPU and network speeds to simulate slower devices.

The Fast or Slow tool is measuring actual speeds.

The Fast or Slow scores more accurately measure real life speeds and are coming from 13 different locations, with actual speed data.

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