Recommended diagnostic tools

Technical support at Brightspot uses the following tools to evaluate a site's performance.

• Lighthouse—This performance tool comes with Google Chrome. Lighthouse provides metrics for both desktop and mobile browsers, such as First Contentful Paint, Last Contentful Paint, and Time to Interactive. Lighthouse identifies bottlenecks in your page's rendering, and provides recommendations to resolve them.
• PageSpeed—This free, online utility, based on the Lighthouse engine, also evaluates performance metrics, identifies bottlenecks, and provides recommendations. PageSpeed's results include a comparison between the URL you are testing and your site's overall domain.
• WebPageTest Pro—This utility expands on the metrics provided by Lighthouse and PageSpeed. You can test your page's performance in different areas of the world, and test multiple URLs simultaneously.
• Waterfall diagrams—Popular desktop browsers provide developer tools that include waterfall diagrams. These diagrams list every request the browser makes to assemble a web page, when the request was initiated, and the time required to receive the result of each request. Requests that have delayed start times or long durations are good candidates for optimization.
  

  

You may want to test your pages in the following environments:

• Desktop Chrome browser over a custom cable connection (50 mbps down and 10 mbps up). This environment represents the best performance a visitor may experience. 
• Mobile device (Android or iOS) and a mobile browser over a 4G connection. This is a typical environment from which your visitors are requesting content.
• Blocking all third-party traffic, such as ad injection or retrievals from social media. This "Brightspot only" environment measures the performance of content delivered from Brightspot servers. You can use these benchmarks to determine the contribution of third-party requests to poor performance.