Cloudflare offers several tools to test the speed of your website, as well as the speed of your Internet connection.

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## Test website speed

### Using Cloudflare

Once your domain is [active on Cloudflare](https://developers.cloudflare.com/fundamentals/setup/manage-domains/add-site/), you can run speed tests within the [Cloudflare dashboard](https://dash.cloudflare.com/?to=/:account/:zone/speed).

This speed test will provide information about critical loading times, performance with and without [Cloudflare's proxy](https://developers.cloudflare.com/fundamentals/concepts/how-cloudflare-works/), and recommended optimizations.

If you experience any issues, make sure you are not blocking specific [user agents](https://developers.cloudflare.com/fundamentals/reference/cloudflare-site-crawling/#other-situations).

### Using third-party tools

If your domain is not yet active on Cloudflare or you want to measure the before and after improvements of using Cloudflare, Cloudflare recommends using the following third-party tools:

* [GTmetrix](https://gtmetrix.com/)
* [DebugBear](https://www.debugbear.com/test/website-speed)
* [Lighthouse](https://developer.chrome.com/docs/lighthouse/)
* [WebPageTest](https://www.webpagetest.org/)

If you use these third-party tools, you should do the following to test website speed:

1. [Pause Cloudflare](https://developers.cloudflare.com/fundamentals/setup/manage-domains/pause-cloudflare/) to remove performance and caching benefits.
2. Run a speed test.
3. Unpause Cloudflare.
4. Run a speed test[1](#user-content-fn-1).
5. Run a second speed test to get your baseline performance with Cloudflare.

### Improve speed

Based on the results of these speed tests, you may want to explore other ways to [optimize your site speed](https://developers.cloudflare.com/speed/) using Cloudflare.

Note

Cloudflare does not consider Time to First Byte (TTFB) the most important measure of page load speed. If you are concerned about a slower TTFB while using Cloudflare, refer to our blog post about [Cloudflare and TTFB](http://blog.cloudflare.com/ttfb-time-to-first-byte-considered-meaningles/).

***

## Test Internet speed

To test the speed of your home network connection (download, update, packet loss, ping measurements, and more), visit [speed.cloudflare.com](https://speed.cloudflare.com).

## Footnotes

1. The results of your first speed test with Cloudflare will likely contain uncached results, which will provide inaccurate results.\
   \
   One of the key ways Cloudflare speeds up your site is through [caching](https://developers.cloudflare.com/learning-paths/get-started/concepts/how-cloudflare-works/#performance), which will appear in the results of the second test. [↩](#user-content-fnref-1)
